Wall of Shame: The F.B.I.

$2.1 Million Reward Paid in Bulger Case

2011-09-27T14:03:00.000-05:00

$2.1 Million Reward Paid in Bulger Case

The Boston Division of the FBI last week received final authorization from the United States Department of Justice to pay the $2.1 million reward to those responsible for providing information which directly led to the arrest of former Top Ten Fugitive James “Whitey” Bulger and his companion, Catherine Greig. This information was generated as a direct result of the FBI’s public service announcement campaign, which was initiated on June 20, 2011.

The FBI offered $2 million for information leading to the arrest of Mr. Bulger, and $100,000 for information leading to the arrest of Ms. Greig. As of Friday, September 23, 2011, the FBI has paid this reward money to more than one individual.

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FBI busted tracking student, demands GPS spy gear return

2010-10-08T19:30:00.000-05:00

FBI busted tracking student, demands GPS spy gear return
After Web uproar, feds reclaimed magnetic tracker found under car

Several days ago a 20-year-old student discovered a GPS tracking device hidden on his car. After his friend posted a picture of it online, speculating about its ties to a secret FBI investigation, the feds themselves came a-knockin', according to Wired.com. They wanted their toy back.

Based on the discussion with the six FBI agents who arrived at his doorstep, Yassir Afifi believes he'd been under surveillance for three to six months. When Wired asked an FBI spokesman about the case, he did not acknowledge ownership of the device, but said that there was an "ongoing investigation."

Afifi says that he cooperated with the FBI and, according to Wired, "did nothing to merit attention from authorities." He is a U.S. citizen who lives in Santa Clara, Calif., where he attends Mission College.

Afifi's father, an Islamic-American activist, died a year ago in Egypt. It is not clear what the circumstances of his death were, or if this was the reason for the FBI's investigation of Afifi.

The gadget itself — a GPS receiver identified as a police-issue-only Cobham Orion Guardian ST820 tracking system, connected to a battery pack and radio transmitter — was magnetically attached to the car. A shot of it made its way around the blogosphere on Monday, after appearing on the community news site Reddit. After Afifi spotted an antenna sticking out during an oil change, the garage owner offered to yank it out. It apparently popped off quite easily.

The question of whether or not sticking a GPS on a car is legal is actually in the middle of a hot debate right now. One federal court recently said that it was legal, while another said that tracking for an "extended period of time" would in fact require a warrant. (For more on this, here's a great piece in Time written by lawyer and tech journalist Adam Cohen.)

Legality aside, the tactic itself might have been carried out with something less than precision. Simply put, tracking devices shouldn't be so easy to find. Wired talked to an agent who said that not only is the tracking device out of date, but state-of-the-art snoops hardwire the stuff directly to the car's electrical system, avoiding the need for a battery.

What's impressive is how quickly Afifi got an identification of the gadget by crowdsourcing it on the Web. On the flipside, that kind of exposure isn't good PR for the FBI. Surely the revelation of the magnetic tracker will cause many people to check under their own cars. Like many noble efforts to keep us safe from terrorism, this one may be turning out to not be so effective. After all, those who already know they're involved in illegal activity probably check their cars every day, rain or shine.

This piece originally appeared on Technolog. For more details on the Afifi story, read the report at Wired.com.

Report: FBI informant might have fired first at Kent State

2010-10-08T18:46:00.000-05:00

Report: FBI informant might have fired first at Kent State
By The Associated Press
Friday, October 8th, 2010 -- 10:29 am

Tape analysis: Pistol shots preceded 1970 Kent St. shooting deaths of 4 students

A forensic audio expert says a tape recording of the 1970 shooting deaths of four Kent State University students by Ohio National Guardsmen reveals the sound of pistol shots 70 seconds earlier.

The Plain Dealer reports Friday that the expert's review detected four shots matching the acoustic signature of a .38-caliber revolver.

Witnesses have previously reported a confrontation involving angry students and a paid FBI informant who was photographing protesters. The informant was carrying a .38-caliber pistol. Some witnesses say he fired it to warn away angry demonstrators, which the soldiers could have mistook for sniper fire.

The FBI informant has denied firing warning shots.

The long-forgotten recording was found in a library archive in 2007.

Information from: The Plain Dealer, http://www.cleveland.com

Source: AP News

Probe: FBI Improperly Spied on Activist Groups

2010-09-21T10:25:00.000-05:00

A Justice Department probe has found the FBI improperly monitored activist groups and individuals between 2001 and 2006. The investigation covered FBI spying on the Thomas Merton Center, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace, The Catholic Worker, and a Quaker peace activist. The FBI was found to have opened and extended the monitoring despite lacking grounds to suspect unlawful activity. Some Greenpeace members were placed on a terrorism watch list after agents wrongly designated their nonviolent civil disobedience as "Acts of Terrorism." In one case, FBI Director Robert Mueller was found to have provided Congress with false information in claiming a 2002 Pittsburgh antiwar rally was monitored because of intelligence that persons with links to international terrorism would be present. Investigators say Mueller’s false testimony was unintentional because he was wrongly informed.

----

FBI probes were improper, Justice saysBy Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 20, 2010; 10:51 PM

The FBI improperly investigated some left-leaning U.S. advocacy groups after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Justice Department said Monday, citing cases in which agents put activists on terrorist watch lists even though they were planning nonviolent civil disobedience.

A report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine absolved the FBI of the most serious allegation: that domestic groups were targeted purely for their activism against the Iraq war and other political activity, which would have violated their First Amendment rights. Civil liberties groups and congressional Democrats had accused the FBI of employing such tactics during George W. Bush's administration.

But the report cited what it called "troubling" FBI practices in the Bush administration's monitoring of domestic groups between 2001 and 2006. In one instance, the report said, FBI officials falsely said an agent photographed antiwar demonstrators as part of a terrorism investigation, which led FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to unintentionally give incorrect information about the incident to Congress.

In another, agents investigated members of the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace over their protest activities "with little or no basis," the report said. Agents kept the case open for more than three years, even though no charges were filed, and put the activists on a terrorist watch list, it said.

The groups that were monitored, which also include a Catholic organization that advocates for peace, compared the FBI's actions to questionable domestic spying tactics the bureau usedagainst antiwar demonstrators and others in the 1960s under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover.

"The use of McCarthyite tactics against PETA and other groups that speak out against cruelty to animals and exploitative corporate and government practices is un-American, unconstitutional, and against the interests of a healthy democracy,'' said a statement from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, an animal rights group that was among those monitored.

Ken Wainstein, former head of the Justice Department's national security division, said the investigations of the groups reflect the FBI's post-Sept. 11 challenge of transforming into an intelligence organization able to detect and dismantle terrorist plots.

"This isn't McCarthyism or the excesses of the 1960s,'' he said. "This is the Bureau developing the programs to be a fully functioning intelligence agency and trying not to step over the First Amendment lines in the process.''

FBI officials defended their tactics, saying they were trying to protect Americans. They noted that the express purpose of Fine's report was to determine whether agents targeted activists purely for their political beliefs.

"After more than four years of investigation and an exhaustive review of hundreds of investigative decisions the FBI made after the September 11 attacks," said FBI spokesman Michael P. Kortan, the report "did not uncover even a single instance where the FBI targeted any group or any individual based on the exercise of a First Amendment right.''

He added that although Fine had "disagreed with a handful of the FBI's investigative determinations over the course of six years,'' the inspector general "has not recommended any significant modifications to the FBI's authority to investigate criminal conduct or national security threats.''

The FBI's efforts to balance its fight against domestic terrorism with respect for the First Amendment have long been controversial. Under Hoover's COINTELPRO program, halted in 1971, the bureau sought to monitor and disrupt leftist antiwar and civil rights groups by such tactics as infiltrating them with informants.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, that balance has been tested further. Civil liberties groups have long accused the bureau of overreacting to the hijackings by improperly monitoring antiwar demonstrators and environmental groups.

Fine's investigation began in 2006 after the American Civil Liberties Union released documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that it said showed that the FBI was monitoring left-leaning groups.

Michael German, an ACLU senior policy counsel and former FBI agent, said Fine's report "clearly shows that the FBI was improperly spying on people's First Amendment-protected activity, and that the FBI didn't have enough internal controls to prevent abuse.''

Fine's report says that in some cases, agents began investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for "factually weak" reasons. In others, the report said, the FBI extended probes "without adequate basis" and improperly kept information about activist groups in its files.

Much of the report is about a 2002 antiwar protest sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh-based organization dedicated to promoting peace.

Mark Berry, a probationary FBI agent with little anti-terrorism experience, attended the rally and photographed demonstrators distributing leaflets. An internal FBI document said the bureau was investigating "Pittsburgh anti-war activity,'' the report said.

After the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request, FBI officials seeking to respond produced an internal "routing slip" saying that Berry was monitoring a local Islamic leader and that his attendance was part of a terrorism probe.

Berry told Fine's investigators that the routing slip was false, and Fine concluded that it was an "after-the-fact reconstruction that was not corroborated by any witnesses or contemporaneous documents.'' Berry could not be located Monday night.

FBI Picks a Fight with Wikipedia

2010-08-08T08:07:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

FBI Picks a Fight with Wikipedia
WebProNews - Chris Crum - Staff Writer

FBI: Take Down Our Seal, Wikimedia Foundation: No.

This week, the New York Times and BBC News both reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has sent the Wikimedia Foundation a letter, ordering the removal of an image of the Bureau's seal from its Wikipedia entry. The Wikimedia Foundation's response thus far has basically been, "no."

The NYT provides copies of both the FBI's letter, and the Wikimedia Foundation's response. Pretty entertaining stuff.

FBI letter to WIKIMEDIA: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterFromLarson.pdf

WIKIMEDIA Letter to FBI: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20100803-wiki-LetterToLarson.pdf

Judge Orders FBI to Turn Over Thousands of Patriot Act Abuse Documents

2010-08-04T11:59:00.000-05:00

Judge Orders FBI to Turn Over Thousands of Patriot Act Abuse Documents
By Ryan Singel

Just one day after a news that an internal audit found that FBI agents abused a Patriot Act power more than 1,000 times, a federal judge ordered the agency Friday to begin turning over thousands of pages of documents related to the agency’s use of a powerful, but extremely secretive investigative tool that can pry into telephone and internet records.

The order for monthly document releases commencing July 5 came in response to a government sunshine request by a civil liberties group, which sued in April over the FBI’s foot-dragging on its broad request.

The April request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation asked the FBI to turn over documents related to its misuse of National Security Letters, self-issued subpoenas that don’t need a judge’s approval and which can get financial, phone and internet records. Recipients of the letters are forbidden by law from ever telling anyone other than their lawyer that they received the request. Though initially warned to use this power sparingly, FBI agents issued more than 47,000 in 2005, more than half of which targeted Americans. Information obtained from the requests, which need only be certified by the agency to be "relevant" to an investigation, are dumped into a data-mining warehouse for perpetuity.

An Inspector General report in March found rampant errors in the small sample of NSLs examined and systemic underreporting of the powers usage to Congress. The report also found that agents issued more than 700 "expedited" letters, some containing materially false sworn statements. These letters had no legal basis and essentially asked companies to turn over data by pretending there was an emergency in order to get the data necessary to get a proper NSL. One former FBI agent says its clear the FBI violated the law.

Now the Justice Department must turn over 2,500 pages of documents a month to the EFF, including information on cozy surveillance contracts between the FBI and telephone companies and information on how data captured by NSLs were put into the FBI’s massive data mining warehouse.

The Justice Department told the court that there were more than 100,000 potentially responsive documents and that ten people are working full time on filling the request for documents. Look out for a run on thick, black magic markers in D.C.

THREAT LEVEL can’t wait to see:

1. All records discussing or reporting violations or potential violations of statutes, Attorney General guidelines, and internal FBI policies governing the use of NSLs, including, but not limited to:

A. Correspondence or communications between the FBI and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board concerning violations or potential violations of statutes…

2. Guidelines, memoranda or communications addressing or discussing the integration of NSL data into the FBIís Investigative Data Warehouse; 3. Contracts between the FBI and three telephone companies [...] which were intended to allow the Counterterrorism Division to obtain telephone toll billing data from the communications industry as expeditiously as possible;

4. Any guidance, memoranda or communications discussing the FBI’s legal authority to issue exigent letters to telecommunications companies, and the relationship between such exigent letters and the FBI’s authority to issue NSLs under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act;

5. Any guidance, memoranda or communications discussing the application of the Fourth Amendment to NSLs issued under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act;

8. Copies of sample or model exigent letters used by the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division;

9. Copies of sample or model NSL approval requests used by the FBIís Counterterrorism Division;

10. Records related to the Counterterrorism Divisionís Electronic Surveillance Operations and Sharing Unit (EOPS).

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/06/judge_orders_fb/#ixzz0veoqoT9N

Serial killer Scott Kimball was sprung from prison after 8-minute hearing, according to newly unsealed documents

2010-07-23T08:22:00.000-05:00

Serial killer Scott Kimball was sprung from prison after 8-minute hearing, according to newly unsealed documents
By John Aguilar Camera Staff Writer
Boulder Daily Camera
Posted:07/22/2010 08:06:40 PM MDT

It took only eight minutes and a judge's simple admonition against breaking the law to turn Scott Kimball from a federal prisoner into a free man -- free to contact his first victim within days of his release and launch a killing spree that wouldn't end for the next 20 months.

Details of a crucial 2002 bond hearing in which the Lafayette native was ordered released with no supervision came to light this week when a judge ruled that a transcript of the U.S. District Court proceeding be unsealed 7 1/2 years after it took place. The document was unsealed as a result of the Camera taking legal action.

The transcript, at only six pages long, may be more remarkable for its banal tone than for any new information it provides about what the government was hoping to gain from making Kimball an FBI informant. In fact, the judge never mentions the bureau or the reason for Kimball's release.

"So I'm going to order that you be released on the $10,000 unsecured bond without supervision or other conditions," U.S. Magistrate Boyd N. Boland said as Kimball stood in a federal courtroom in Denver on Dec. 18, 2002, without a lawyer. "The deputy will prepare that, and I'll have you review it, and, if it's acceptable, sign it."

The judge also said he would assign Kimball an attorney.

Kimball, who had been in federal prison for more than a year on check-fraud charges, responded: "Yes, your honor. Thank you."

The 43-year-old four-time felon then left FCI-Englewood federal penitentiary in Littleton and, a week later, made contact with his first victim, 24-year-old LeAnn Emry.

Emry, who would wind up dead in a desolate Utah canyon at the end of January 2003, would become one of three women last seen with Kimball.

Jennifer Marcum, whose body has never been found, would disappear the following month. She was the person Kimball used as his ticket out of prison, when he told the FBI that she was planning to kill a witness in a federal drug case and that he could inform on her.

Kaysi McLeod, the 19-year-old daughter of a Westminster woman Kimball later married, would die in August 2003 in the mountains near Walden.

Kimball pleaded guilty last year to killing all three women, as well as to the 2004 murder of his uncle. He was a paid informant for the FBI the entire time.

Boulder County District Attorney Stan Garnett, whose office prosecuted Kimball's case and forged a plea agreement that put him away for 70 years, said he was bothered by what appeared to be a hasty decision by federal prosecutors to request Kimball's release.

Even though he didn't have a criminally violent past in late 2002, Garnett said, Kimball had accumulated several felonies and managed to pull off an escape from a halfway house in Montana.

"It's not clear what the rush was to release him into the public on Dec. 18," he said. "Obviously, it was unfortunate that he was released and released so quickly and with so little supervision; as we know he went into a violent phase."

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office declined to comment Thursday, and a call to an FBI spokeswoman wasn't returned.

Howard Emry, LeAnn's father, thinks the FBI -- and by extension the U.S. Attorney's Office -- was so intent on using Kimball as an informant that the bureau chose to ignore Kimball's unsavory past.

"I think there was pressure from the FBI because they were sold on him being helpful to their cases," Emry said. "They were so desperate in trying to get Kimball to help them that they didn't do their homework."

Contact Camera Staff Writer John Aguilar at 303-473-1389 or aguilarj@dailycamera.com.

FBI files reveal Ted Kennedy faced constant death threats

2010-06-15T19:46:00.000-05:00

Monday June 14, 2010
FBI files reveal Ted Kennedy faced constant death threats
by The Washington Post

WASHINGTON - Sen. Edward M. Kennedy lived with constant threats on his life after the assassinations of his brothers and was monitored by the FBI for his possible ties to communist radicals in Latin America, according to a trove of FBI files on the late senator released Monday.

The more than 2,200 pages, disclosed in response to Freedom of Information Act requests filed by news organizations, cover the FBI's relationship with the Massachusetts Democrat from 1961 to 1985. Kennedy died of cancer in August.

The bulk of the material covers FBI investigations of threats of violence and extortion against Kennedy and other public figures, including Kennedy's political rival President Ronald Reagan. One anonymous letter sent in October 1968 threatened "assassination for Kennedy number three within twenty four hours . . . all Kennedy residents are in danger on that day."

Sirhan Sirhan, who fatally shot Kennedy's brother, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968, even offered $1 million to a fellow inmate in California to kill Edward Kennedy, according to the files, which say the prisoner declined.

Ted Kennedy was acutely aware of such threats but rarely spoke of them publicly. Then-Sen. Walter Mondale recounted that Kennedy's own fears bubbled powerfully to the surface on an infamous plane trip in April 1969, less than a year after Robert Kennedy's death. Operating on little sleep and not much food, the senator suddenly burst out loud enough for the whole plane to hear: "They killed Jack and they killed Bobby, and now they're trying to kill me. . . . They're trying to kill me!"

Kennedy waited 12 years after Robert was assassinated before running for president, largely because of his family's concerns about such threats, according to a longtime aide, Robert Shrum. "You took precautions," said Shrum, Kennedy's speechwriter during his 1980 presidential campaign. "We had a doctor with us everywhere we went. We had ambulances in most places. The memory was there. But you just lived with it."

Concerned about the threats, Shrum and other Kennedy aides asked President Jimmy Carter, Kennedy's rival for the Democratic nomination, for Secret Service protection two months before Kennedy officially announced his candidacy. Carter granted the request.

Longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover is a regular presence in the documents, which touch on some of the controversies involving Kennedy and his family - and Hoover's own troubled legacy of spying on Americans. The FBI closely monitored Kennedy's fact-finding trip to Mexico, Central America and South America in 1961, and one document shows that Hoover received a file from an FBI employee in Mexico City that said the senator "is interested in meeting with 'leftists' to talk with them and determine why they think as they do."

The document added that "the Kennedy party" was meeting with a university official in Mexico "on whom this office and bureau has information indicating communist sympathies."

In a statement accompanying the document release, the FBI said that "given the Bureau's long interest in the influence of Central American revolutionaries and communists on American radicals, the Bureau took an interest in Kennedy's travels." During the trip, the documents show, the FBI recovered a notebook kept by Kennedy documenting his travels that was accidentally left on his airplane.

The files include 77 pages on the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne when Kennedy drove his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island off Martha's Vineyard in 1969. The pages are nearly all newspaper articles, but one internal FBI document informed Hoover of the accident and says the police chief in Edgartown, Mass., "confidentially" advised that Kennedy was the driver.

"Stated fact Senator Kennedy was driver is not being revealed to anyone," the document said.

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Read the files: http://foia.fbi.gov/foiaindex/kennedy.htm

FBI Laboratory Seeks to Enhance the Efficiency of the National DNA Index System

2010-03-23T11:39:00.000-05:00

Press Release
For Immediate Release
March 23, 2010

Washington D.C.
FBI National Press Office
(202) 324-3691

FBI Laboratory Seeks to Enhance the Efficiency of the National DNA Index System

In order to enhance the efficiency of the nation’s DNA database, also known as the National DNA Index System (NDIS), the FBI has established an ongoing dialogue with various groups to gain a broader perspective and better understand the needs of the entire law enforcement community. Those groups include the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors (ASCLD), the Scientific Working Group on DNA Analysis Methods (SWGDAM), CODIS State Administrators, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), and various federal, state, local, and tribal agencies. The FBI is committed to seeking common ground in the interest of protecting the public, reducing backlogs, ensuring privacy, and maintaining the integrity of the National DNA database.

Many public law enforcement agencies collaborate with private laboratories for analysis of their DNA samples. The FBI Laboratory is currently re-evaluating existing policies, standards, and protocols, including requirements for outsourcing DNA analysis to private laboratories and review of their results by public law enforcement laboratories. Private laboratories continue to be an integral part of the process and share in the success of NDIS. The current policy assessment will focus on these contributions and will engage both public and private laboratories.

The administration and operation of the National DNA database is an inherently governmental function that supports criminal investigations conducted by our federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement partners. Therefore, the FBI’s assessment does not include re-evaluating access to NDIS. Necessary improvements can be gained by enhancing the efficiency of NDIS procedures.

DNA analysis and, by extension, DNA databases, have proven to be invaluable to the law enforcement community and to victims of violent crimes and their families. Since more violent crimes are solved as more records are placed into the database, enhancing the operational procedures for optimal efficiency of NDIS is imperative.

3-Minute Lesson on COINTELPRO

2009-12-10T23:24:00.000-06:00

Cultural training needed for FBI

2009-10-30T10:48:00.000-05:00

Cultural training needed for FBI
Originally printed at http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/editorials/67340687.html

Federal Bureau of Investigation agents don’t receive cultural awareness or language training when assigned to serve Indian reservations. Many tribal communities don’t believe non-tribal court personnel and non-tribal police are culturally sensitive.

Nevertheless, FBI agents have an extensive range of language and cultural sensitivity training courses available to them when serving in foreign nations. In recent years, FBI headquarters established a Language Services Translation Center, capable of translating in 100 languages, and has developed language training and cultural awareness materials available to FBI employees in 32 different languages. Most of the FBI’s linguistic and cultural training is focused on monitoring terrorist activities in foreign countries. None of the language or cultural awareness training offered to FBI employees includes support for FBI agents assigned to tribal communities.

In Indian country, FBI agents are responsible for investigating the various serious crimes listed in the Major Crimes Act including murder, manslaughter, kidnapping, assaults, arson, burglary, robbery and various felonies. County or state police are responsible for investigating major crimes on reservations in Public Law 280 states.

The method of revolving police assignments limits the ability of FBI agents to gain cumulative knowledge and experience, and get to know how to better serve tribal communities.

However, most FBI agents do not have experience with investigating most crimes on the Major Crimes Act list. FBI investigation priorities include counterterrorism, counterintelligence, cyber crime, public corruption, civil rights violations, organized crime, white-collar crime, and major thefts or violent crimes. Indian country crimes are listed under major thefts or violent crimes. Since Major Crimes Act violations are federal offenses, FBI agents are assigned to investigate major crimes in non-Public Law 280 Indian reservations.

For most FBI agents, investigating crime on Indian reservations is a low priority assignment. Few agents apply for the service to spend their careers investigating crime on Indian reservations. They tend to move between assignments as they work through their careers and often agents serve a particular group of Indian reservations for limited times. Hence non-tribal federal police officers have limited opportunities to learn and understand a tribal community before they are reassigned to new postings or other types of activities. The method of revolving police assignments limits the ability of FBI agents to gain cumulative knowledge and experience, and get to know how to better serve tribal communities.

Tribal community members are concerned about the absence of cultural understanding and awareness expressed by FBI agents. The agents are not trained in American Indian cultures, histories, languages, or contemporary policies or law. FBI agents are assigned to several tribal communities at the same time, further inhibiting the possibility that they will get to know any one reservation community well enough to conduct effective interviews, elicit cooperation, and gain trust from the tribal communities.

In recent years, the FBI has found that it must increase its commitment to train agents in language and cultural awareness to effectively operate in foreign countries. Reservations are communities with distinct cultures, languages, community relations, histories, legal and policy relations, and FBI agents could more effectively serve tribal communities if they had more cultural training and sustained interactions with tribal communities.

More direct contact and cultural understanding by FBI agents will build trust, cooperation, and greatly facilitate more effective crime investigations and crime solving on Indian reservations. Tribal communities need to know that FBI agents will carry out their duties with respect for tribal community, goals and values. Without greater cultural understanding from FBI agents, community supported justice will be hard to achieve on federal Indian reservations.

Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns

2009-10-29T13:40:00.000-05:00

October 29, 2009
Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/us/29manual.html
By CHARLIE SAVAGE, NY Times

WASHINGTON — After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil.

Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities, including in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio. The operation unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules.

The F.B.I.’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.”; The disclosure of the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era.

In seeking the revised rules, the bureau said it needed greater flexibility to hunt for would-be terrorists inside the United States. But the manual’s details have alarmed privacy advocates.

One section lays out a low threshold to start investigating a person or group as a potential security threat. Another allows agents to use ethnicity or religion as a factor — as long as it is not the only one — when selecting subjects for scrutiny.

“It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union.

But Valerie Caproni, the F.B.I.’s general counsel, said the bureau has adequate safeguards to protect civil liberties as it looks for people who could pose a threat.

“Those who say the F.B.I. should not collect information on a person or group unless there is a specific reason to suspect that the target is up to no good seriously miss the mark,” Ms. Caproni said. “The F.B.I. has been told that we need to determine who poses a threat to the national security — not simply to investigate persons who have come onto our radar screen.”

The manual authorizes agents to open an “assessment” to “proactively” seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in national security threats.

Agents may begin such assessments against a target without a particular factual justification. The basis for such an inquiry “cannot be arbitrary or groundless speculation,” the manual says, but the standard is “difficult to define.”

Assessments permit agents to use potentially intrusive techniques, like sending confidential informants to infiltrate organizations and following and photographing targets in public.

F.B.I. agents previously had similar powers when looking for potential criminal activity. But until the recent changes, greater justification was required to use the powers in national security investigations because they receive less judicial oversight.

If agents turn up something specific to suggest wrongdoing, they can begin a “preliminary” or “full” investigation and use additional techniques, like wiretapping. But even if agents find nothing, the personal information they collect during assessments can be retained in F.B.I. databases, the manual says.

When selecting targets, agents are permitted to consider political speech or religion as one criterion. The manual tells agents not to engage in racial profiling, but it authorizes them to take into account “specific and relevant ethnic behavior” and to “identify locations of concentrated ethnic communities.”

Farhana Khera, president of Muslim Advocates, said the F.B.I. was harassing Muslim-Americans by singling them out for scrutiny. Her group was among those that sued the bureau to release the manual.

“We have seen even in recent months the revelation of the F.B.I. going into mosques — not where they have a specific reason to believe there is criminal activity, but as ‘agent provocateurs’ who are trying to incite young individuals to join a purported terror plot,” Ms. Khera said. “We think the F.B.I. should be focused on following actual leads rather than putting entire communities under the microscope.”

Ms. Caproni, the F.B.I. lawyer, denied that the bureau engages in racial profiling. She cited the search for signs of the Somali group, Al Shabaab, linked to the Minneapolis teenager to illustrate why the manual allows agents to consider ethnicity when deciding where to look. In that case, the bureau worried that other such teenagers might return from Somalia to carry out domestic operations.

Agents are trained to ignore ethnicity when looking for groups that have no ethnic tie, like environmental extremists, she said, but “if you are looking for Al Shabaab, you are looking for Somalis.”

Among the manual’s safeguards, agents must use the “least intrusive investigative method that effectively accomplishes the operational objective.” When infiltrating an organization, agents cannot sabotage its “legitimate social or political agenda,” nor lead it “into criminal activity that otherwise probably would not have occurred.”

Portions of the manual were redacted, including pages about “undisclosed participation” in an organization’s activities by agents or informants, “requesting information without revealing F.B.I. affiliation or the true purpose of a request,” and using “ethnic/racial demographics.”

The attorney general guidelines for F.B.I. operations date back to 1976, when a Congressional investigation by the so-called Church Committee uncovered decades of illegal domestic spying by the bureau on groups perceived to be subversive — including civil rights, women’s rights and antiwar groups — under the bureau’s longtime former director, J. Edgar Hoover, who died in 1972.

The Church Committee proposed that rules for the F.B.I.’s domestic security investigations be written into federal law. To forestall legislation, the attorney general in the Ford administration, Edward Levi, issued his own guidelines that established such limits internally.

Since then, administrations of both parties have repeatedly adjusted the guidelines.

In September 2008, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey signed the new F.B.I. guidelines that expanded changes begun under his predecessor, John Ashcroft, after the Sept. 11 attacks. The guidelines went into effect and the F.B.I. completed the manual putting them into place last December.

There are no signs that the current attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., plans to roll back the changes. A spokeswoman said Mr. Holder was monitoring them “to see how well they work” and would make refinements if necessary.

The F.B.I., however, is revising the manual. Ms. Caproni said she was taking part in weekly high-level meetings to evaluate suggestions from agents and expected about 20 changes.

Many proposals have been requests for greater flexibility. For example, some agents said requirements that they record in F.B.I. computers every assessment, no matter how minor, were too time consuming. But Ms. Caproni said the rule aided oversight and would not be changed.

She also said that the F.B.I. takes seriously its duty to protect freedom while preventing terrorist attacks. “I don’t like to think of us as a spy agency because that makes me really nervous,” she said. “We don’t want to live in an environment where people in the United States think the government is spying on them. That’s an oppressive environment to live in and we don’t want to live that way.”

What the public should understand, she continued, is that the F.B.I. is seeking to become a more intelligence-driven agency that can figure out how best to deploy its agents to get ahead of potential threats.

“And to do that,” she said, “you need information.”

The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

2009-09-04T11:34:00.000-05:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/fitz09042009.html

September 4-6, 2009

The Case of the Biodevastation 7
What the Police Won't Apologize For
By DON FITZ

I n early September, St. Louis police will send an apology for their illegal arrest of biodiversity activists. Be assured that it will not mention their role in destroying public dialogue on dangers of genetically contaminated food.

On August 24, 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Eastern Missouri announced that the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners would pay $13,500 to each of four anti-genetic engineering activists for violating their first and fourth amendment rights and would apologize to them for police actions in May, 2003. [1] That was when several hundred people gathered to protest the World Agricultural Forum [WAF] and hold the 7th Biodevastation Gathering to expose the racist use of genetic engineering in agriculture.

But the letter of apology is highly unlikely to address the most serious aspects of the repression. Do not expect the letter to say anything about helping to consolidate control of world agriculture and throwing 1 billion people off of small farms. Don’t look for the letter to mention the role of police in attempts to force genetically contaminated food on Africans with immuno-compromised health. And don’t be surprised if the letter contains not a word about St. Louis police entering into a conspiracy with Monsanto, the FBI and corporate media to eliminate public discussion of the potential threats of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

St. Louis police were not stand-alone players. As Daniel (digger) Romano wrote in the August 31 St. Louis Post-Dispatch “…Allied Intelligence [is] the private security agency hired by the WAF and its principle player, Monsanto, the biotech giant. Allied Intelligence told police ‘50,000 anarchists’ were coming to St. Louis to riot and wreak havoc on the city.” [2]

The police apology will certainly misdirect attention onto its own illegal and repulsive behavior of May, 2003: warrantless entry into a home where a woman was subjected to “an unlawful and humiliating strip search,” a second warrantless entry under the false claim of the building being condemned, and arresting several activists for “riding a bicycle without a license,” a crime which did not exist. [1]

Under the FBI Eye

Preparations for the Biodevastation 7 Gathering started in 2002 when Jim Scheff, an organizer for the Missouri Forest Alliance, called to tell me that the WAF would be meeting in St. Louis the upcoming year. He suggested that Biodevastation, which had been held in five cities after beginning in St. Louis in 1998, return to Monsanto’s home town so that people coming to WAF could hear a different view of biotechnology.

Documents obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that the FBI was deeply involved in scrutinizing many documents that I wrote for the event, including emails from my computer. The ACLU judged the FBI reports to be some “of the most troubling documents we received.” [3]

A November 2005 cover letter from the FBI refers to “Subject: GATEWAY GREEN ALLIANCE/01012000 TO PRESENT,” indicating that we had been in FBI sights for years. [4] Its first memo on “Counterterrorism” asserted that “The WAF was created to provide a continuing, neutral arena for the discussion of world agriculture…” Counterposed to the “neutral” WAF, the memo warned of “issue-specific terrorist groups…which oppose…the bio-engineering of plants and animals.” [5]

What particularly worried authors of the memo was that “organizers from the Gateway Green Alliance, a local affiliate of the Green Party USA, have joined with member of the Organization for Black Struggle in St. Louis and are attempting to label the WAF as a ‘forum on environmental racism’ in an attempt to lure African-American groups.” [5] (The authors probably meant to say “Biodevastation” rather than “WAF.”)

The memo observed that “no specific threats of violence or unlawful protest have been received.” But its authors were disturbed that “protest organizers” might be “able to successfully promote a racial element to the forum…” [5]

Other FBI counterterrorism documents listed frightening people who hoped to speak at St. Louis, including Vandana Shiva, Percy Schmeiser, Mae-Wan Ho, Brian Tokar, Ignacio Chapela and Michael Hansen. [6] Any defender of the Public Order must have been horrified to read in the captured documents of the threat to national security posed by the Caravan Across the Continent held in conjunction with Biodevastation: “The Caravan will be a month-long bicycle spectacle covering over 1000 puppet shows, presentations, speak-outs, freak-outs, clown acts, and music…” It invited “citizens, clowns, puppeteers, bike riders, messengers, farmers” and urged everyone “to bring a bicycle and join the ride!” [7]

The FBI was most traumatized by information that “The May 2003 Biodevastation Gathering will be the cutting edge event defining links between racism and the biotechnology industry.” Documents monitored by its sleuths uncovered plans for the event to “focus attention on efforts” to use “Food Aide as a weapon of narrow economic interests and to force genetically contaminated food on Africa.” [5]

Luckily, the FBI did not stand alone in efforts to protect good citizens. FOIA reports confirm that the FBI had “been working with local police agencies to collect intelligence related to the WAF.” [7] Not content to rely on local police, the FBI proudly documented collaboration with the private sector:

Corporate officials from Monsanto who monitor the Biodev website (www.biodev.org) allege that the speakers at the Biodev conference are against genetic engineering of any type, that they are outspoken critics of Monsanto and are extreme in their views. [7]

A Public Dialogue Cut Short

During weeks prior to Biodevastation 7, there were a few stories about the dangers of GMOs, but St. Louis media focused on police preparation for 50,000 anarchists to invade downtown. They warned business owners to protect their property.

Then, on the opening day of Biodevastation 7, the Mother of All Horrors occurred: There was an actual public debate on genetic engineering! The only St. Louis daily paper, the Post-Dispatch, carried a front page story, “Focus on the future of agriculture.” It had an article describing the corporate view of the WAF on one side and another article reporting on Biodevastation on the other.

Not to worry. St. Louis police, with backup from the FBI and Monsanto, had worked overtime to ensure that reporting would take a sharp turn. Shortly after I got to the Gathering site and prepared to coordinate presentations, phone calls began pouring in that demonstrators were being arrested all over town.

Members of the Flying Rutabaga Bicycle Circus were arrested for the fictitious crime of “riding a bicycle without a license.” About the same time, a building inspector nailed a “condemned” sign on a St. Louis home just before police pushed through the door and arrested those who had been planning to take part in weekend protests. They were charged with “inhabiting a condemned building.”

Two hours later, police raided the Community Arts and Media Project (CAMP) building, which housed the St. Louis Independent Media Center, Green Party of St. Louis and several other groups, taking more to jail. Sarah Bantz, organizer for Missouri Resistance Against Genetic Engineering (MoRAGE), which was coordinating the demonstration planned at the WAF, was pulled over while driving to give a talk at the Gathering. Her vitamin A was seized as a possible illegal drug and she was taken to jail for not wearing a seatbelt.

As I tried to make sure that speakers (minus Sarah Bantz) were there, that panels could start on time, and that lunches were on their way, I was called by one reporter after another. With the lurid drama rivaled only by stories of a US politician whose weenie went where it wasn’t supposed to go, corporate media had turned on a dime. Dangers of genetic engineering were far from their minds as reporters drooled at the prospect of a story on demonstrator violence.

Police Chief Mokwa egged on the frenzy. He held a press conference to display the “weapons” seized during the raids: rocks, roofing nails, torches and Molotov cocktails.

By the next day, it became apparent that the rocks were paperweights; the roofing nails were to repair a leaky roof; and the torches were flaming batons of the Bicycle Circus. When the St. Louis Independent Media Center website posted an eyewitness report of a cop putting toilet paper or a rag in a beer bottle, all press reports of “Molotov cocktails” disappeared as if they had never been mentioned. The “weapons” charges were the first charges dropped against those arrested.

Of course, throughout the events, the only potential violence discussed was that of demonstrators. When reporters asked me about potential violence, I never hesitated to point out that “There is a real threat of lawlessness when the WAF is controlled by Monsanto, a company that lawlessly trespasses on the land of farmers like Percy Schmeiser, criminally steals samples of crops and violently drops pesticide bombs on their fields to test if their crops are Roundup-resistant.”

Reporters would tell me that that was not what was meant. They wanted to know if there was a threat of violence during the demonstration set for May 18. I always responded “Yes, there is a real threat of violence. When public safety is put in the hands of a police chief who has condoned the police murder of over a dozen black youth in recent years, the city should be concerned.”

Predictably, the press had zero interest in reporting on corporate or state violence. Their prewritten script was to interview one side predicting that demonstrators would be violent and “balance” it with a few seconds of an organizer denying the charge.

Police Attacks

Police attacks on protestors were illegal, traumatic and disruptive to planned events. Kelley Meister wrote in detail of her ordeal. The night before her home was invaded, “police had been circling our house relentlessly, following my friends home, and harassing them on the street, and I had feared waking up to the police knocking down my door.” [8] After breakfast the next morning, a police car pulled up.

Two police officers pushed past me to enter the house, and I asked if they had a warrant. When they said, “No,” I stated that I did not give them permission to enter my house, and I again asked for a warrant. The officers told me that a warrant was not necessary because this was a condemned building. [8]

After being arrested and put in a police van, Meister

…watched many cops enter and exit our house, most notably, an officer carrying a piece of art ripped down off the wall from my room. The cops also stole many other people’s personal items such as journals, posters, props for the circus and puppet shows, welding tools, roofing nails, and all of our bicycles that were in the building. The bicycles were eventually returned with slashed tires, but most of the other stuff that was stolen is either “missing” or being held as evidence. [8]

When allowed to return home several days later, she found

The house was trashed. In my bedroom, shelves had been disassembled or knocked over, boxes of oil paints and other art supplies dumped out, my large reading chair was on its side and in the middle of the room, personal items were smashed, and a pile of my clothes that had been dumped from a small cabinet… [8]

Meister and a housemate found “their clothes were drenched in urine,” compliments of St. Louis police. [9] When it apologizes for “well-intentioned mistakes,” the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners should explain how urinating on clothes is both well-intentioned and a mistake.

What Corporate Media Didn’t Report

By the second day of Biodevastation 7, the mania had died down. The Post-Dispatch was even mildly critical of what it called “pre-emptive” arrests. But the press never returned to a discussion of how genetic engineering threatens human health, pollutes the environment, and prepares for agro-business domination of Africa. What remained was a debate of whether the police had “overreacted.”

Two photographs from the Fall 2003 Synthesis/Regeneration illustrate the bizarre unreality of the police/media fantasy. The back cover has a photo of the main post office in downtown St. Louis, which was boarded up to protect it from marauding anarchist hordes. On p. 2 is a photo of a security guard with so little to do at Biodevastation 7 that she is playing with the children of those listening to talks.

Though the PATRIOT Act made crackdowns at events like Biodevastation 7 easier, such actions existed long before 9-11. The hysteria generated by police departments is reminiscent of “red scares” of the 1920s and phobic reaction to black organizing that white Americans have felt through the centuries. When Jamala Rogers of the Organization for Black Struggle introduced the Environmental Racism panel at Biodevastation 7, the police raids were at the top of the news. She commented that “You are seeing what black people in St. Louis experience on a daily basis.”

One of the vitally important presentations that police raids knocked out of media attention was that by Mwananyanda Lewanika of Zambia’s National Institute for Scientific & Industrial Research. The previous year, US trade representatives had bitterly denounced Zambia for rejecting genetically engineered (GE) corn to feed its hungry. Lewanika traced the origin of hunger in Zambia to the Structural Adjustment Program of the 1990s that “stopped government involvement in agricultural production.” [10] With government assistance gone, small farmers in southern Zambia could not meet the food needs of their region. Since there was an abundance of food in the northern part of the country, the West could have helped Zambia improve the infrastructure of roads.

But that would have made Zambia more independent of the West rather than dependent on it. So the US offered to donate surplus GE corn. Zambian scientists replied that (a) GE corn might contain food toxins or allergens, (b) effects would be particularly serious in Zambia since corn comprised up to 80% of the diet, and (c) effects would be most severe on the most vulnerable the young, old and immuno-compromised, which is a large population in southern Africa. Though plenty of non-GE corn was available and could have been donated, the US insisted on offering only the corn that was offensive to Zambians and then denounced them for not accepting it. [10]

Marching Onward

By shifting attention to a manufactured threat of terrorism, the hysteria ensured that discussion of efforts to force GE corn on Africa would not reach public awareness. This puts the six year old belated apology by the St. Louis Police Department (SLPD) in a different light.

The St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners claimed that the raids were a “mistake” even though police acted “with well intentions.” [9] The 2009 apology spins the myth that the SLPD acted on its own volition.

But the FBI documents paint a very different picture. They suggest that the most likely course of events was:

A. The Monsanto/WAF/Allied Intelligence troika contacted…

B. the FBI, which contacted…

C. the SLPD, which pumped fantasies to…

D. the St. Louis media, which eliminated a nascent dialogue on GMOs and focused exclusively on the illusory anarchist invasion.

Far from being the key culprit, the SLPD was targeted to take the rap. It was a pawn in a far bigger game of using genetic engineering to destroy small farmers across the globe.

Describing police activities during 2003 as “mistakes” continues the campaign of misinformation. Their attacks were no “mistake.” They were a vital element in shifting the public eye away from what agribusiness planned for Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Anyone who seriously believes actions by the SLPD were mistakes should let us know how often police departments invade offices such as Monsanto World Headquarters, piss on tuxedos of corporate executives, steal their electronic equipment, tell the press to print front page stories of corporate terrorists, and arrest corporate officers for possession of vitamin A.

If 100% of such police attacks are against those resisting corporate power and 0% of police violence is against corporations, then a reasonable person might conclude that the function of police is to protect corporate power. This is quite a bit different from accounts of the police being a neutral party that occasionally makes the “mistake” of “preemptive” attacks.

We should applaud each of the plaintiffs against the SLPD receiving $13,500. But rather than clearing the air, the police apology serves to further mystify the 2003 web of intrigues. For the corporations that move pawns around, the 2009 apology is merely a tiny step backward in their continuing march to subjugate world agriculture.

Don Fitz is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought, which is published for members of The Greens/Green Party USA. If you know of where to find a horde of 50,000 anarchists, please contact him at fitzdon@aol.com

Notes

1. American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. (August 24, 2009). ACLU applauds police apology to protestors. Press Release.

2. Daniel (digger) Romano. (August 31, 2009). Letter to the Editor, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, p. A11.

3. American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. (Janaury 27, 2006). Letter to Barbara Chicherio and Don Fitz.

4. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (November 15, 2005). Letter to Denise D. Lieberman, American Civil Liberties Union. FOIPA No. 1021258-000.

5. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (April 9, 2003). Counterterrorism memo. Case ID No: 300A-SL-188478.

6. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (May 8, 2003). Counterterrorism memo. Case ID No: 300A-SL-188478.

7. Federal Bureau of Investigation. (April 15, 2003). Counterterrorism memo. Case ID No: 300A-SL-188478.

8. Kelley Meister. (Fall, 2003). Report from the Bolozone. Synthesis/Regeneration, 32, pp. 5–7.

9. Patrick O’Connell. (August 25, 2009). City police apologize for raids in 2003. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, pp. A1, A9.

10. Mwananyanda Lewanika. (Fall, 2003). The real story behind the food crisis in Zambia. Synthesis/Regeneration, 32, pp. 12–14.

'Badly Fragmented' Forensic Science System Needs Overhaul

2009-02-18T18:00:00.000-06:00

Date: Feb. 18, 2009

Contacts: Sara Frueh, Media Relations Officer
Luwam Yeibio, Media Relations Assistant
Office of News and Public Information
202-334-2138; e-mail news@nas.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

'Badly Fragmented' Forensic Science System Needs Overhaul;
Evidence to Support Reliability of Many Techniques Is Lacking

WASHINGTON -- A congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council finds serious deficiencies in the nation's forensic science system and calls for major reforms and new research. Rigorous and mandatory certification programs for forensic scientists are currently lacking, the report says, as are strong standards and protocols for analyzing and reporting on evidence. And there is a dearth of peer-reviewed, published studies establishing the scientific bases and reliability of many forensic methods. Moreover, many forensic science labs are underfunded, understaffed, and have no effective oversight.

Forensic evidence is often offered in criminal prosecutions and civil litigation to support conclusions about individualization -- in other words, to "match" a piece of evidence to a particular person, weapon, or other source. But with the exception of nuclear DNA analysis, the report says, no forensic method has been rigorously shown able to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source. Non-DNA forensic disciplines have important roles, but many need substantial research to validate basic premises and techniques, assess limitations, and discern the sources and magnitude of error, said the committee that wrote the report. Even methods that are too imprecise to identify a specific individual can provide valuable information and help narrow the range of possible suspects or sources.

"Reliable forensic evidence increases the ability of law enforcement officials to identify those who commit crimes, and it protects innocent people from being convicted of crimes they didn't commit," said committee co-chair Harry T. Edwards, senior circuit judge and chief judge emeritus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. "Because it is clear that judicial review alone will not cure the infirmities of the forensic science community, there is a tremendous need for the forensic science community to improve."

Strong leadership is needed to adopt and promote an aggressive, long-term agenda to strengthen forensic science, the report says. To achieve this end, the report strongly urges Congress to establish a new, independent National Institute of Forensic Science to lead research efforts, establish and enforce standards for forensic science professionals and laboratories, and oversee education standards. "Much research is needed not only to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of current forensic methods but also to innovate and develop them further," said committee co-chair Constantine Gatsonis, professor of biostatistics and director of the Center for Statistical Sciences at Brown University. "An organized and well-supported research enterprise is a key requirement for carrying this out."

To ensure the efficacy of the work done by forensic scientists and other practitioners in the field, public forensic science laboratories should be made independent from or autonomous within police departments and prosecutors' offices, the report says. This would allow labs to set their own budget priorities and resolve any cultural pressures caused by the differing missions of forensic science labs and law enforcement agencies.

The report offers no judgment about past convictions or pending cases, and it offers no view as to whether the courts should reassess cases that already have been tried. Rather, the report describes and analyzes the current situation in the forensic science community and makes recommendations for the future.

Certification and Accreditation Should Be Mandatory

Many professionals in the forensic science community and the medical examiner system have worked for years to achieve excellence in their fields, aiming to follow high ethical norms, develop sound professional standards, and ensure accurate results in their practice. But there are great disparities among existing forensic science operations in federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. The disparities appear in funding, access to analytical instruments, and availability of skilled and well-trained personnel; and in certification, accreditation, and oversight. This has left the forensic science system fragmented and the quality of practice uneven. Except in a few states, forensic laboratories are not required to meet high standards for quality assurance, nor are practitioners required to be certified. These shortcomings pose a threat to the quality and credibility of forensic science practice and its service to the justice system, concluded the committee.

Certification should be mandatory for forensic science professionals, the report says. Among the steps required for certification should be written examinations, supervised practice, proficiency testing, and adherence to a code of ethics. Accreditation for laboratories should be required as well. Labs should establish quality-control procedures designed to ensure that best practices are followed, confirm the continued validity and reliability of procedures, and identify mistakes, fraud, and bias, the report says.

Setting standards for certification and accreditation should be one of the responsibilities of the new National Institute of Forensic Science recommended in the report. The institute should work with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, government and private labs, Scientific Working Groups, and other partners to develop protocols and best practices for forensic analysis, which should inform the standards.

Existing data suggest that forensic laboratories are underfunded and understaffed, which contributes to case backlogs and makes it hard for laboratories to do as much as they could to inform investigations and avoid errors, the report says. Additional resources will be necessary to create a high-quality, self-correcting forensic science system.

Evidence Base Often Sparse, Varies Among Disciplines

Nuclear DNA analysis has been subjected to more scrutiny than any other forensic discipline, with extensive experimentation and validation performed prior to its use in investigations. This is not the case with most other forensic science methods, which have evolved piecemeal in response to law enforcement needs, and which have never been strongly supported by federal research or closely scrutinized by the scientific community.

As a result, there has been little rigorous research to investigate how accurately and reliably many forensic science disciplines can do what they purport to be able to do. In terms of a scientific basis, the disciplines based on biological or chemical analysis, such as toxicology and fiber analysis, generally hold an edge over fields based on subjective interpretation by experts, such as fingerprint and toolmark analysis. And there are variations within the latter group; for example, there is more available research and protocols for fingerprint analysis than for bitemarks.

Nuclear DNA analysis enjoys a pre-eminent position not only because the chances of a false positive are minuscule, but also because the likelihood of such errors is quantifiable, the report notes. Studies have been conducted on the amount of genetic variation among individuals, so an examiner can state in numerical terms the chances that a declared match is wrong. In contrast, for many other forensic disciplines -- such as fingerprint and toolmark analysis -- no studies have been conducted of large populations to determine how many sources might share the same or similar features. For every forensic science method, results should indicate the level of uncertainty in the measurements made, and studies should be conducted that enable these values to be estimated, the report says.

There is some evidence that fingerprints are unique to each person, and it is plausible that careful analysis could accurately discern whether two prints have a common source, the report says. However, claims that these analyses have zero-error rates are not plausible; uniqueness does not guarantee that two individuals' prints are always sufficiently different that they could not be confused, for example. Studies should accumulate data on how much a person's fingerprints vary from impression to impression, as well as the degree to which fingerprints vary across a population. With this kind of research, examiners could begin to attach confidence limits to conclusions about whether a print is linked to a particular person.

Disciplines that are too imprecise to identify an individual may still be able to provide accurate and useful information to help narrow the pool of possible suspects, weapons, or other sources, the report says. For example, the committee found no evidence that microscopic hair analysis can reliably associate a hair with a specific individual, but noted that the technique may provide information that either includes or excludes a subpopulation.

In addition to investigating the limits of the techniques themselves, studies should also examine sources and rates of human error, the report says. As part of this effort, more research should be done on "contextual bias," which occurs when the results of forensic analysis are influenced by an examiner's knowledge about the suspect's background or an investigator's knowledge of a case. One study found that fingerprint examiners did not always agree even with their own past conclusions when the same evidence was presented in a different context.

Court Testimony Should Be Grounded in Science, Acknowledge Uncertainties

The committee was not asked to determine whether analysis from particular forensic science methods should be admissible in court, and did not do so. However, it concluded that the courts cannot cure the ills of the forensic science community. "The partisan adversarial system used in the courts to determine the admissibility of forensic science evidence is often inadequate to the task," said Edwards. "And because the judicial system embodies a case-by-case adjudicatory approach, the courts are not well-suited to address the systemic problems in many of the forensic science disciplines."

The committee also concluded that two criteria should guide the law's admission of and reliance upon forensic evidence in criminal trials: the extent to which the forensic science discipline is founded on a reliable scientific methodology that lets it accurately analyze evidence and report findings; and the extent to which the discipline relies on human interpretation that could be tainted by error, bias, or the absence of sound procedures and performance standards.

The report points out the critical need to standardize and clarify the terms used by forensic science experts who testify in court about the results of investigations. The words commonly used -- such as "match," "consistent with," and "cannot be excluded as the source of" -- are not well-defined or used consistently, despite the great impact they have on how juries and judges perceive evidence.

In addition, any testimony stemming from forensic science laboratory reports must clearly describe the limits of the analysis; currently, failure to acknowledge uncertainty in findings is common. The simple reality is that interpretation of forensic evidence is not infallible -- quite the contrary, said the committee. Exonerations from DNA testing have shown the potential danger of giving undue weight to evidence and testimony derived from imperfect testing and analysis.

Strong, Independent Leadership Needed

The existing forensic science enterprise lacks the necessary governance structure to move beyond its weaknesses, the report says. The recommended new National Institute of Forensic Science could take on its tasks in a manner that is as objective and free of bias as possible -- one with the authority and resources to implement a fresh agenda designed to address the problems found by the committee. The institute should have a full-time administrator and an advisory board with expertise in research and education, the forensic science disciplines, physical and life sciences, and measurements and standards, among other fields.

The committee carefully considered whether such a governing body could be established within an existing agency, and determined that it could not. There is little doubt that some existing federal entities are too wedded to the current forensic science community, which is deficient in too many respects. And existing agencies have failed to pursue a strong research agenda to confirm the evidentiary reliability of methodologies used in a number of forensic science disciplines.

The report was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice at the request of Congress. The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies. They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter. The Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

Copies of Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward are available from the National Academies Press; tel. 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242 or on the Internet at http://www.nap.edu. Reporters may obtain a copy from the Office of News and Public Information (contacts listed above). In addition, a podcast of the public briefing held to release this report is available at http://national-academies.org/podcast.

###

[ This news release and report are available at http://national-academies.org ]

Drinan: Lawmaker, priest, and target of FBI scrutiny

2009-01-29T22:08:00.000-06:00

Drinan: Lawmaker, priest, and target of FBI scrutiny
By Michael Paulson, Bosto Globe, January 28, 2009

It remains one of the stranger episodes in the annals of congressional-FBI relations: In the winter of 1975, US Representative Robert F. Drinan was touring the FBI headquarters when he broke away and opened a drawer to find a set of index cards under his name.

A three-month battle ensued between the Massachusetts Democrat and the federal law enforcement agency over access to the file. When Drinan finally got a redacted copy of his own record, he pronounced it garbage, filled with news clippings in which the names of people already published in the newspapers were carefully blacked out by federal officials.

Now, on the second anniversary of his death, a copy of Drinan's FBI file, obtained by the Globe through a Freedom of Information Act request, provides a bookend to the story.

The file is unlikely to reshape history's view of the only Jesuit priest to serve in Congress, but it provides a backstage look at the dispute between the congressman and the agency and a reminder of how much the FBI changed over the second half of the 20th century.

In the 1970s and before, the FBI clearly viewed the congressman as potential trouble. At one point, when Drinan was quoted by a news service denouncing Attorney General John N. Mitchell as "the most dangerous attorney general that we have ever had," an FBI official scribbled on a document, "This fellow Drinan is like McGovern + Anderson - anything to get publicity."

The document does not make clear who McGovern and Anderson are, but the references seem likely to be to Senator George S. McGovern and either US Representative John B. Anderson or Jack Anderson, a syndicated newspaper columnist.

But by 1994, when the FBI was asked to do a background check on Drinan for a possible federal appointment, the tone was completely different. The file is packed with testimonials from Drinan's colleagues describing him in highly laudatory terms.

"Twenty-seven persons . . . were interviewed," the FBI reported. "They provided favorable comments concerning Father Drinan's character, associates, reputation, and loyalty."

Drinan, born in Boston in 1920, had served as a professor and dean at Boston College Law School from 1956 to 1971, when he began a decade in Congress after being elected in 1970 as an antiwar candidate. Drinan was an outspoken liberal, a critic of the Vietnam War, a forceful advocate of civil liberties, and, to the dismay of church officials, a supporter of abortion rights. He was also the first member of Congress to call for the impeachment of President Nixon.

Drinan announced he would not seek reelection in 1981 after Pope John Paul II decreed that priests should not serve in elective office. Drinan then taught at Georgetown Law School from 1981 until his death in 2007.

The file indicates that the FBI had run its first check on Drinan in 1960, a decade before his election to Congress; upon his election, a note indicates that the bureau's files "reflect that the Reverend Drinan has been active in civil rights matters."

In 1971, a suspicious nun wrote FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, saying, "I had doubted Father Drinan's authenticity as a Catholic priest because I had read of certain views he expressed that seemed to be un-American, as well as unorthodox, from a religious standpoint. If he is someone who has been 'planted' in the church, he could do great harm."

In 1975, the FBI investigated an anonymous death threat against several public figures, including Drinan, from someone purporting to represent "antiliberal and anti-Communist groups."

But the heart of the file is the history of the dispute that began in February 1975, when Drinan took a congressional tour of the FBI and discovered 20 to 30 3-by-5 cards with his name on them in a file. Drinan demanded to know how the FBI could justify collecting information on private citizens, and said, "I assure you I shall work to prevent the FBI from further engaging in the practice of attaching a stigma to persons whose political or social views may be at variance with the temporary majority of the nation."

"I have never at any time been involved in anything related to criminal prosecution," Drinan wrote to the FBI. "Consequently I was astonished and chagrined to discover the surveillance of a political nature."

The FBI accused Drinan of having ignored instructions and "delved into a file drawer containing index cards" and refused to honor Drinan's timeline for releasing his files, saying that would amount to special treatment for a congressman.

After considerable back-and-forth and for a fee of $8.10, the FBI released a redacted version of Drinan's file three months after his tour; he quickly made it public and denounced it.

"In his view, they had stepped across the line into violating the civil liberties of citizens by keeping track of what he was doing," said Arthur D. Wolf, a law professor at Western New England College School of Law in Springfield. Wolf was a special counsel to Drinan from 1973 to 1978. "He thought the FBI should concentrate on crime and not worry about people exercising their right to speech."

By the time the FBI next scrutinized Drinan, in 1994 with his consent, the tone had completely changed. The agency reported two minor issues: In 1975, there had been an unsubstantiated complaint that Drinan had improperly solicited disabled veterans for a campaign, and in 1985 he had been arrested for protesting apartheid in front of South Africa's embassy.

But the file is overflowing with praise from Drinan's co-workers, supervisors, and fellow Jesuits, all of whom were asked about Drinan's loyalty to the United States, a standard question in background checks.

"No derogatory or negative information was revealed," the Newark office reported to FBI headquarters, while the Kansas City office said simply, "All made favorable comments regarding the candidate."

Source URL: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/01/28/drinan_lawmaker_priest_and_target_of_fbi_scrutiny?mode=PF

Domestic Surveillance: FBI Files

2009-01-20T13:43:00.000-06:00

On this Martin Luther King holiday, it's appropriate to recall the controversial surveillance of the civil rights leader by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1960s. From 1963 to his death in 1968, the FBI wiretapped King and conducted a intensive campaign to discredit him. The Bureau amassed a huge amount of material on King and almost 17,000 pages of his file have been made public through the Freedom of Information Act.

The FBI's FOIA website displays only about 200 pages of information -- essentially a 1977 report on the government's surveillance of King and its suspected role in his assassination. (But you can find the complete file in the Internet Archive.) In addition to the King document, the site provides access to surveillance files on many other celebrities, including Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Cesar Chavez, Marilyn Monroe and Albert Einstein.

Ever wonder if the FBI has a file on you? Through FOIA, you can request a copy of your file or that of a deceased relative. The FBI's instructions are here. For help composing a FOIA request, try the Get My FBI File and Get Grandpa's FBI File web sites.

Rogue FBI agent breaks silence

2008-12-20T01:50:00.000-06:00

Rogue FBI agent breaks silence
From Rich Phillips
CNN Senior Producer

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) -- Former FBI agent John Connolly, whose fall from celebrated mob-buster to paid gangland flunky captivated a South Florida courtroom for weeks, broke his long silence... at his [December] sentencing hearing.

Connolly, 68, denied having any role in a 1982 mob hit, telling the family of slain businessman John Callahan: "It's heart breaking to hear what happened to your father, and to your husband ... My heart is broken when I hear what you say."

Later, under a spirited cross-examination, Connolly explained that rubbing elbows with killers and gangsters and winning their confidence was part of the job. His attorney argued, "He did what the FBI wanted him to do and now all of a sudden, he's responsible for all these heinous acts."

Connolly did not testify at his trial. The prosecutor, Michael Van Zamft, asked for a life sentence, saying the 30-year minimum sentence is too little because "Mr. Connolly abused his badge."

Judge Stanford Blake postponed the sentencing until January 15. He said he needed time to consider a defense motion challenging the second-degree murder conviction.

Connolly was convicted last month in the 1982 slaying of Callahan, an executive with World Jai-Alai. Callahan's bullet-pocked body was found in the trunk of a Cadillac parked at Miami International Airport.

Connolly's testimony followed that of several other witnesses, including Callahan's son and a former FBI agent.

Callahan's son, Patrick, read letters that he, his sister, and his mother wrote. He said that his mother considered his father "the love of my life" for 23 years.

Former FBI agent Billy Reagan told the judge: "John had nothing to do with these murders, your honor."

During the two-month trial, jurors heard that Connolly had told his mob connections that Callahan, 45, was a potential witness against them, setting him up for the gangland-style execution.

Connolly previewed his denials in a jailhouse interview published Thursday in The Boston Globe. He faces 30 years to life at his sentencing.

"I did not commit these crimes I was charged with," Connolly told the newspaper. "I never sold my badge. I never took anybody's money. I never caused anybody to be hurt, at least not knowingly, and I never would."

According to testimony at his trial, Connolly was co-opted by the very gangsters he was supposed to be pursuing -- members of South Boston's notorious Winter Hill gang. His story is said to be the inspiration for the character played by Matt Damon in the 2006 Martin Scorsese movie, "The Departed."

Connolly's sordid tale has been closely followed in New England, where he grew up in Boston's "Southie" neighborhood, the same area long dominated by the Winter Hill gang and its notorious leader, James" Whitey" Bulger. Sought in 19 slayings, Bulger is the FBI's second most-wanted fugitive.

During the first two decades of his FBI career, Connolly won kudos in the bureau's Boston office, cultivating informants against New England mobsters. Prosecutors said Connolly was corrupted by his two highest-ranking snitches: Bulger and Stephen ''The Rifleman'' Flemmi.

Connolly retired from the FBI in 1990 and later was indicted on federal racketeering and other charges stemming from his long relationship with Bulger and Flemmi. He was convicted of racketeering in 2002 and was serving a 10-year federal prison sentence when he was indicted in 2005 in the Callahan slaying.

During testimony, jurors heard that Connolly was on the mob payroll, collecting $235,000 from Bulger and Flemmi while shielding his mob pals from prosecution and leaking the identities of informants.

The prosecution's star witnesses at the Miami trial were Flemmi, who is now in prison, and mob hit man John Martorano, who has admitted to 20 murders, served 12 years in prison and is now free.

Callahan, who often socialized with gangsters, had asked the gang to execute Oklahoma businessman Roger Wheeler over a business dispute, according to testimony. Martorano killed Wheeler in 1981 on a golf course, shooting him once between the eyes, prosecutors said.

After Connolly told Bulger and Flemmi that Callahan was going to implicate them in the slaying, Martorano was sent to do away with Callahan, prosecutors said.

But one star witness did not testify -- the former FBI agent who inspired the 1997 film "Donnie Brasco." He refused to take the stand after the judge denied his request to testify anonymously.

Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI's Use of Murderers as Informants

2008-12-20T01:30:00.000-06:00

Congressional Reports: H. Rpt. 108-414 – Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI's Use of Murderers as Informants
Vols. 1 & 2
November 20, 2003

This Report by the House Committee on Government Reform discusses the consequences of the FBI's use of murderers as informants in New England. It focuses mainly on the 1965 murder of Edward ‘‘Teddy’’ Deegan,and the actions of federal law enforcement officials to protect cooperating witnesses and informants.

Volume 1 (57.4MB, 1,802 pages) and Volume 2 (73.8MB, 1,716 pages ) of the Report are available as a ZIP files.

Front Material
I. Executive Summary
II. Why the Committee Investigated These Matters
III. Joseph Barboza and the Deegan Murder Prosecution [6.9 MB PDF file]
IV. The Use of James "Whitey" Bulger as an Informant... [1.3 MB PDF file]
V. Institutional Reluctance to Accept Oversight
VI. Conclusions and Recommendations
Full Text of Report [9.6 MB PDF file]

Timeline of the FBI’s four-decades long cover-up of complicity in Edward Deegan’s murder, and the agencies frame-up of four innocent men

2008-12-20T01:03:00.000-06:00

Timeline of the FBI’s four-decades long cover-up of complicity in Edward Deegan’s murder, and the agencies frame-up of four innocent men

By Hans Sherrer
Justice:Denied magazine, Issue 27, Winter 2005, page 24

1964 – Boston FBI agent H. Paul Rico wrote in an October 19, 1964, memorandum that an informant reported Edward “Teddy” Deegan, a local hoodlum, was marked for a mob hit. “A memorandum from the Boston Office of the FBI to the Director of the FBI [J. Edgar Hoover] dated March 10, 1965, disclosed an informant’s report that [Vincent “Jimmy The Bear”] Flemmi and [Joseph] Barboza had contacted [Raymond] Patriarca to get his “OK” to kill Deegan. That same day, another informant told Rico that Flemmi believed Patriarca approved the “hit” and that a “dry run” had been made. Neither Rico, Condon, Handley, nor any other FBI agents warned Deegan or took steps to prevent their informants, Flemmi and Barboza, from carrying out the plan.” 1

1965 - Edward Deegan was shot to death in a Chelsea, Massachusetts alley on March 12th – two days after FBI Director Hoover had been informed he was marked for death, and did nothing to warn him or otherwise protect him.

1965 - An FBI memo dated March 19, 1965 (seven days after Deegan’s murder), notes: “Informants report that Ronald Casessa, Romeo Martin, Vincent James Flemmi, and Joseph Barboza, prominent local hoodlums, were responsible for the [Deegan] killing. They accomplished this by having Roy French, another Boston hoodlum, set Deegan up in a proposed ‘breaking and entering’ in Chelsea, Mass. French apparently walked in behind Deegan when they were gaining entrance to the building and fired the first shot hitting Deegan in the back of the head. Casessa and Martin immediately thereafter shot Deegan from the front. The State and Chelsea Police Departments had reports similar to those discussed above.” 2

1965 - FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was sent a memo dated June 9, 1965 by the FBI agent in charge of he Boston office identifying Flemmi as the murderer of seven men, including Deegan. The memo stated, “From all indications, (Jimmy The Bear) is going to continue to commit murder. ... The informant’s potential outweighs the risks.” 3

1967 - Six men were indicted in Suffolk County, Massachusetts (Boston) for Deegan’s murder, however the FBI informant known by the bureau to be one of the actual killers – Vincent Flemmi – was not indicted.

1968 – On July 31st Louis Greco, Henry Tameleo and Peter Limone were convicted of Deegan’s murder and sentenced to death. Joseph Salvati was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted as an accessory to Deegan’s murder and two counts of conspiracy. The jury didn’t believe multiple witnesses who testified that Greco was in Miami at the time of Deegan’s murder – which the FBI knew was true. The prosecution’s star witness was Joseph Barboza, an FBI informant and one of the people known by the FBI to have been present at Deegan’s killing.

1968 - On August 1st, FBI agent Rico bragged at a mob party in Boston about how easy it was to convict the “four pigeons” - Greco, Tameleo, Salvati and Limone - and he thought “it was funny” that Greco was sentenced to death when the FBI knew he was over 1,500 miles away in Miami when Deegan was murdered.

1972 - Greco, Tameleo and Limone’s death sentences are commuted to life in prison in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Furman v. Georgia (1972) decision.

1977 - Attorney John Cavicchi began efforts to clear Greco. Those efforts continued until Greco’s death 18 years later in 1995. Cavicchi then began aiding Limone.

1983 – In August the Massachusetts Advisory Board of Pardons recommended gubernatorial commutation of Limone’s sentence. Limone’s petition was supported by Deegan’s family, who believed he was innocent. However, “FBI agents … then channeled false information to the office of the Governor to dissuade him from approving the commutation petition. It worked. On September 20, 1983, Governor Dukakis denied Limone’s petition.” 4

1985 - After the FBI funneled false information to the governor’s office, Governor Dukakis denied Greco’s commutation that had been recommended by the Massachusetts Advisory Board of Pardons.

1985 - Henry Tameleo died in prison of respiratory failure in August. He had been imprisoned for 17 years. Tameleo was 84, and the oldest prisoner in the Massachusetts state prison system at the time of his death.

1986 - After the FBI provides it with false information, the Advisory Board of Pardons rescinds its vote approving a commutation hearing for Salvati.

1993 - The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office ignores information provided by a Massachusetts’ State Trooper that Salvati had been framed for Deegan’s murder.

1993 - After the FBI funneled false information to the governor’s office, Governor Weld denied Greco’s commutation that had been recommended by the Massachusetts Advisory Board of Pardons.

1995 - Greco dies in prison from colon cancer and heart disease after 27 years of incarceration.

1997 - Louis Greco Jr., one of Greco’s sons, commits suicide by drinking a bottle of Drano.

1997 - Salvati is released after 30 years of incarceration when Massachusetts’ governor commutes his life sentence to time served. Salvati’s wife Marie visited him every week he was imprisoned, and she was waiting when he was released.

2000 - In December a Justice Department investigation into FBI corruption uncovers secret FBI informant files that contain information concerning the FBI’s prior knowledge that Deegan was marked for a hit by FBI informants, that the FBI didn’t try to warn or otherwise protect Deegan, that Deegan’s murder was carried out by FBI informants, and that four men known by the FBI to be innocent – Greco, Limone, Tameleo and Salvati – were framed for the murder with the complicity of the FBI. The FBI documents show that Limone had actually tried to protect Deegan by warning him that he was in danger.

2001 - Limone’s conviction is vacated in January and he is released after 33 years, 2 months and 5 days imprisonment. He is 66.

2001 - Salvati’s conviction is vacated in January.

2001 - Limone, Greco’s son, and relatives of Tameleo file separate federal lawsuits against multiple state and federal defendants for wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution, violation of their civil rights, etc. Limone’s suit asks for a $300 million in damages, and Greco’s asks for $75 million.

2002 - Salvati filed $300 million federal lawsuit against multiple state and federal defendants for wrongful imprisonment, malicious prosecution, violation of his civil rights, etc.

2003 – In June, Boston U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner rejected a motion to dismiss filed by the defendants in Limone’s suit. The motion argued the decisions leading to Limone’s indictment and conviction were judgment calls immune from a lawsuit. In rejecting the motion, Judge Gertner wrote, “‘Obviously conduct cannot be ‘discretionary’ if it violates the constitution, federal laws, or established agency policies and regulations. ‘There can be no doubt that suborning perjury and fabricating evidence violate the constitution.’” 5

2003 – In November an almost 150-page report by the House Government Reform Committee was released after a two-year congressional investigation into the FBI and its connections to the New England Mafia. The report condemned the FBI’s use of known murderers as informants, the FBI’s shielding of those murderers from prosecution, and the FBI’s use of perjurious testimony by murderers to knowingly convict innocent people. The report concluded that the FBI’s efforts “must be considered one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement.” 6

2004 –Edward “Teddy” Deegan’s younger brother and his two daughters filed lawsuits against the federal government. They claimed damages for the government’s complicity in his murder, including Director Hoover’s being informed two days prior to his death that he was marked for death and doing nothing to stop the killers - who were FBI informants - or to warn or otherwise protect Deegan. Paul F. Denver, the attorney for Deegan’s daughters, said “The government owes the daughters compensation for the wrongful death of their father because agents knew there was a threat against their father’s life and took no steps to prevent the death of Teddy Deegan,” 7

2004 –In September a Massachusetts state judge posthumously vacated Greco’s conviction. The lawyer representing Greco’s family said, “This was an innocent man who was framed, and the most amazing part is the government knew it.” 8

2004 –Federal Judge Gertner ruled on September 17th that the federal lawsuits related to the four men can go forward, since their causes of action that began in 1968, continued after enactment of a 1974 law that eliminated the federal government’s immunity from lawsuits for wrongdoing by federal agents. In her decision, Judge Gertner didn’t mince words, “… the state prosecution of Limone, Greco, Salvati, and Tameleo was procured by the FBI and nurtured by both federal agents and state officers who knew that the charges were bogus. None of the agents or supervisors involved took steps to stop the prosecution. Indeed, they did just the opposite.” 9

-----

Sources:

FBI To Be Sued for $300 million, Talkleft.com website, August 25, 2002.
Suffolk DA clears Greco posthumously on 1965 murder rap, by J.M. Lawrence, Boston Herald, November 4, 2004
Reports: ex-trooper had information to clear Salvati, by J. M. Lawrence, Boston Herald, June 13, 2003.
Limone, et al v. United States, Civ. No. 02-10890-NG (DC MA), MEMORANDUM AND ORDER RE: MOTIONS TO DISMISS, September 17, 2004
Endnotes:
1 Limone, et al v. United States, Civ. No. 02-10890-NG (DC MA), MEMORAN-DUM AND ORDER RE: MOTIONS TO DISMISS, September 17, 2004, at 7-8.
2 Limone, Id., at 8-9.
3 Devilish deal: Probers Unveil Memo Show-ing Boston FBI Protected Killer, by J.M. Lawrence, Boston Herald, May 12, 2002.
4 Limone, supra,, at 13.
5 Judge Rules Lawsuit Alleging FBI Frameup Can Proceed, AP, July 18, 2003.
6 Report: FBI Shielded Killers, Washing-ton D.C., CBS News.com, November 21, 2003.
7 Some Wonder Does FBI Still Stand For Fi-delity, Bravery, Integrity?, Newswithviews.com, October 5, 2004.
8 District attorney’s office drops charges posthumously in frame-up related to New England mob, Associated Press, Boston Herald, November 4, 2004
9 Limone, supra, at 11.

Gov't to pay $102M for mob convictions

2008-12-20T01:01:00.000-06:00

Gov't to pay $102M for mob convictions

BOSTON (AP) — In a stinging rebuke of the FBI, a federal judge on Thursday ordered the government to pay a record judgment of nearly $102 million because agents withheld evidence that would have kept four men from spending decades in prison for a mob murder they did not commit.

Judge Nancy Gertner told a packed courtroom that agents were trying to protect informants when they encouraged a witness to lie, then withheld evidence they knew could prove the four men were not involved in the 1965 murder of Edward "Teddy" Deegan, a small-time thug shot in an alley.

Gertner said Boston FBI agents knew mob hitman Joseph "The Animal" Barboza lied when he named Joseph Salvati, Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco as Deegan's killers. She said the FBI considered the four "collateral damage" in its war against the Mafia, the bureau's top priority in the 1960s.

Tameleo and Greco died behind bars, and Salvati and Limone spent three decades in prison before they were exonerated in 2001. Salvati, Limone and the families of the other men sued the federal government for malicious prosecution.

"Do I want the money? Yes, I want my children, my grandchildren to have things I didn't have, but nothing can compensate for what they've done," said Salvati, 75.

"It's been a long time coming," said Limone, 73. "What I've been through — I hope it never happens to anyone else."

The case is only the latest to highlight the cozy relationship Boston mobsters enjoyed with FBI agents for decades. Former Boston agent John Connolly was sentenced in 2002 to 10 years in prison for his role in protecting two organized crime kingpins, including one who remains a fugitive.

Gertner said FBI agents Dennis Condon and H. Paul Rico not only withheld evidence of Barboza's lie, but told state prosecutors who were handling the Deegan murder investigation that they had checked out Barboza's story and it was true.

"The FBI's misconduct was clearly the sole cause of this conviction," the judge said.

The government had argued federal authorities had no duty to share information with state officials who prosecuted the men. Federal authorities cannot be held responsible for the results of a state prosecution, a Justice Department lawyer said.

Gertner rejected that argument.

"The government's position is, in a word, absurd," she said.

A Boston FBI spokeswoman referred calls to the Department of Justice. Charles Miller, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said officials would have no immediate comment.

Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal advocacy group that specializes in overturning wrongful convictions, said the $101.75 million award is the largest ever in a wrongful-conviction case.

Gertner awarded $26 million to Limone, $29 million to Salvati, $13 million to Tameleo's estate and $28 million to Greco's estate. The wives of Limone and Salvati and the estate of Tameleo's deceased wife each received slightly more than $1 million. The men's 10 children were each awarded $250,000.

Limone and Salvati stared straight ahead as the judge announced her ruling, but a gasp was heard from the area where their friends and family were sitting when Gertner said how much the government would be forced to pay.

At the time of Deegan's slaying, Tameleo and Limone were reputed leaders of the New England mob, while Greco and Salvati had minor criminal records.

Deegan's murder had gone unsolved until the FBI recruited Barboza to testify against several organized crime figures. Barboza wanted to protect a fellow FBI informant, Vincent "Jimmy" Flemmi, who was involved in the Deegan slaying, and agreed to testify for state prosecutors in the case, plaintiff's lawyers said.

Tameleo died in prison in 1985 after serving 18 years. Greco died in prison in 1995 after serving 28 years.

Salvati was sentenced to life in prison as an accessory to murder. He was released from prison when his sentence was commuted in 1997, after serving a little more than 29 years. Limone served 33 years in prison before being freed in 2001.

Salvati and Limone were exonerated in 2001 after FBI memos dating back to the Deegan case surfaced during probes into the Boston FBI's relationship with gangsters and FBI informants Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi, Vincent's brother, and James "Whitey" Bulger, who has been on the FBI's "10 Most Wanted" list for years.

Republican Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who chaired the House Government Reform Committee when it conducted an investigation of the FBI and its use of criminal informants, said he was gratified by the judge's ruling.

"This was one of the biggest injustices that I have ever seen," Burton said.

One of the agents blamed in the case, Rico, was arrested in 2003 on murder and conspiracy charges in the 1981 killing of a Tulsa, businessman. Rico died in state custody in 2004 while awaiting trial.

Attorneys for Condon did not immediately return phone messages seeking comment Thursday.

During testimony before Burton's committee in 2001, Rico denied he and his partner helped frame an innocent man for Deegan's death, but acknowledged that Salvati wrongly spent 30 years in prison for the crime.

Rico was unrepentant when asked how he felt about Salvati's wrongful imprisonment.

"What do you want, tears?" he said.

FBI informant system called a failure

2008-12-20T00:59:00.000-06:00

FBI informant system called a failure
House report finds no prrof against Bulger
By Ralph Ranalli, Boston Globe Staff, 11/21/2003

Ending a two-year investigation into the 40-year history of the FBI's organized-crime informant program in New England, a congressional committee has branded the program as "one of the greatest failures in the history of federal law enforcement" and has vowed to turn its attention to nationwide FBI management practices.

The report by the House Committee on Government Reform charges that, as a result of the ultrasecret informant program, FBI agents became corrupt, encouraged perjury in death penalty cases, let innocent men languish and die in prison, and allowed people to be murdered, all in the name of protecting informants.

The report states that continued vigilance over the FBI's use of informants is essential in an era "when the United States is faced by threats from international terrorism, and a number of law enforcement tools are being justifiably strengthened."

"The results of the committee's investigation make clear that the FBI must improve management of its informant programs to ensure that agents are not corrupted," the report states. "The Committee will examine the current FBI's management, security and discipline to prevent similar events in the future."

The report also states that the committee failed to substantiate allegations that one of the probe's key witnesses, former Senate president William M. Bulger, received any favors from the FBI or used his power to punish those who investigated his informant brother, South Boston underworld boss James "Whitey" Bulger.

It does, however, allege that some of William Bulger's testimony before the committee was inconsistent with the testimony of other witnesses.

Titled "Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI's Use of Murderers as Informants," the report also faulted the US Department of Justice for not doing more to aid the congressional probe and obstructing its work.

"Throughout the Committee's investigation, it encountered an institutional reluctance to accept oversight," the report states. "The Committee has concluded that the Justice Department failed to take responsibilities to assist Congress as seriously as it should have."

The critical report is the latest fallout from the Boston FBI informant scandal, which has been unfolding for more than five years. Related events have included the imprisonment of a decorated former FBI agent for racketeering, the release of innocent men who were wrongly imprisoned for more than 30 years, and protected FBI informants and witnesses being exposed as serial murderers.

The scandal prompted Janet Reno, in one of her last acts as US attorney general, to adopt tough new informant guidelines in January 2001. Among other changes, the new rules gave Justice Department lawyers a role in monitoring the FBI's use of informants.

In response to the report, an FBI spokesman in Washington said yesterday that, under Director Robert Mueller, the agency has not only embraced the Reno reforms, but has gone beyond them to completely "reengineer" the agency's informant programs with improved training, record-keeping, and accountability.

"When Director Mueller was brought on board, his intent was to change the direction of the FBI and move it into the 21st century," spokesman Edwin Cogswell said. "While the FBI recognizes that there have been instances of misconduct by a few FBI employees, it also recognizes the importance of human-source information in terrorism, criminal, and counterintelligence investigations."

In making its case against the FBI's past practices with informants, the 141-page report went back more than 40 years, focusing on the efforts of agents to recruit and protect informants and witnesses with violent and murderous pasts, such as underworld hit man Joseph "The Animal" Barboza.

To illustrate, the report recounted a tape-recorded conversation between Barboza and New England mob boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca in which Barboza said he planned to kill a rival by burning down his apartment building, even though the man's mother was likely to be inside.

The FBI later used Barboza as a witness to frame four men for the 1965 murder of small-time criminal Edward "Teddy" Deegan. Two of those men died in prison, while the other two, Joseph Salvati and Peter Limone, have been released in recent years after spending more than 30 years in prison. Part of the reason they were framed, the report concluded, was to protect other FBI informants.

"The use of murderers as government informants created problems that were, and continue to be, extremely harmful to the administration of justice," the report states.

While also extremely critical of the Boston FBI's use of two other informants who have been charged with numerous murders, Stephen Flemmi and James "Whitey" Bulger, the committee was less harsh with Bulger's brother William, who has long been rumored to have had a closer relationship with his criminal sibling.

The committee appeared to take at face value William Bulger's representations under oath that he did not use his power to punish law enforcement authorities who pursued his brother, or to aid FBI agent John Connolly, his brother's chief handler with the bureau.

"This is an exoneration," William Bulger's attorney, Thomas Kiley, said yesterday. "This report gives the lie to all of the street legends that people have passed along forever."

Kiley called it unfortunate that the committee spent so much time pursuing his client that it may have distracted them from their legitimate inquiry into FBI wrongdoing.

"All we are is a sideshow to a very critical report on the way that the FBI conducted its business over the years," Kiley said.

The committee report does say that it was "concerned about the factual accuracy" in two areas of William Bulger's testimony, including his assertion that he was not contacted by the FBI about his fugitive brother's whereabouts until years after he disappeared in 1995. That testimony was contradicted by the statements of retired FBI agent John Gamel, who told the Globe that he had spoken with William Bulger shortly after Whitey Bulger's indictment in January 1995 on racketeering charges.

Overall, the report called the informant scandal the inevitable result of the government's use of an "ends justifies the means" approach to law enforcement.

"No one disputes the proposition that destroying organized crime in the United States was an important law enforcement objective," the report states, referring to the use of Irish gangsters to inform on their rivals in the Italian Mafia. "However, the steps that were taken may have been more injurious than the results obtained."

Rogue FBI agent convicted of deadly mob leaks

2008-12-20T00:55:00.000-06:00

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- Former FBI agent John Connolly was convicted Thursday of second-degree murder for leaking information to Boston mobsters that led to the 1982 shooting death of a gambling executive who also had ties to gangsters.

Former FBI afent John Connolly showed no reaction as he was convicted of tipping off Boston mobsters.

Jurors deliberated less than three days before delivering the verdict following a two-month trial.

The jury acquitted Connolly of conspiracy, but he still faces life in prison when sentenced December 4.

Prosecutors said former World Jai-Alai president John Callahan was killed after Connolly warned gangsters that Callahan might implicate them in other slayings. Boston mob kingpins James "Whitey" Bulger and Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi were FBI informants handled by Connolly.

Connolly, who showed no emotion when the verdict was read, long denied involvement in Callahan's killing.

Connolly was convicted in 2002 of racketeering because of his relationship with Bulger and Flemmi, including a 1995 tip that enabled Bulger to escape arrest and begin a life on the run that continues to this day. Bulger is one of the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted" fugitives.

The story that unfolded over the past two months in a Miami courtroom spanned more than two decades of Boston's underworld, a tale that has already spawned several books and was the basis for the 2006 Martin Scorcese film "The Departed." Matt Damon played a crooked Connolly-like law enforcement officer and Jack Nicholson was the Bulger-esque Irish-American mobster.

Connolly retired from the FBI in 1990 and was later indicted on federal racketeering and other charges stemming from his long relationship with Bulger and Flemmi, who paid the agent $235,000 over the years for protection, according to trial testimony.

In a case considered one of the FBI's worst failures, Connolly was convicted in 2002 and is serving a 10-year federal prison sentence in the corruption case. He was indicted in 2005 in the killing of Callahan, 45, whose body was found stuffed in the trunk of his Cadillac at Miami International Airport in August 1982. He had been shot at least twice.

Confessed mob hit man John Martorano testified that he shot Callahan -- at one time a good friend -- based on Connolly's warning that the gangsters would probably all go to prison if Callahan talked to the FBI about an Oklahoma businessman's killing a year earlier.

Defense lawyer Manuel Casabielle insisted that Connolly was innocent, that his job as a top FBI organized crime-buster meant dealing with unsavory characters -- "top-echelon informants" in FBI parlance -- who possessed sensitive information about top Mafia kingpins in Boston.

"Him and other agents like him were the tip of the spear in the fight against the Mafia," Casabielle told jurors in closing arguments.

But Flemmi, Martorano and other mob figures testified that Connolly made sure the gang was shielded from prosecution for numerous crimes, even multiple murders, and supplied information about possible turncoats or "rats" in their own ranks that needed elimination. Prosecutors said at least two other men who were FBI informants died violently because of Connolly's leaks.

"John Connolly swore an oath to the FBI and the United States of America," said prosecutor Michael Von Zamft. "He gave up that public trust because he decided he would rather be a gangster than an FBI agent."

Callahan was killed, according to testimony, because Connolly told them the FBI was about to apply pressure on Callahan to give up information about the 1981 killing of World Jai-Alai owner Roger Wheeler in the parking lot of a country club in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The gangsters feared Callahan would not hold up and might confess to the FBI that they were responsible for Wheeler's slaying. Callahan had wanted Wheeler dead so he could retake control of World Jai-Alai.

Flemmi is serving a life prison sentence and admitted to 10 murders. Martorano cut a deal with prosecutors by agreeing to testify against Connolly, and spent 12 years in prison after admitting to 20 murders, including the killings of Wheeler and Callahan. Martorano is now a free man.

Bulger cohort unloads on stand

2008-12-20T00:51:00.000-06:00

Bulger cohort unloads on stand
Says Connolly accepted $235k in gang payoffs
By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff September 23, 2008

MIAMI - The gangster and the FBI agent met clandestinely for years at the homes of FBI agents and shared secrets late at night while strolling along beaches in Quincy, Dorchester, and South Boston.

But yesterday, longtime FBI informant Stephen "The Rifleman" Flemmi faced retired FBI agent John J. Connolly Jr. in a Florida courtroom as the ex-gangster testified that Connolly pocketed $235,000 in payoffs, compromised investigations, and leaked information that led to several murders.

After taking a $25,000 kickback that he knew came from drug proceeds in 1983, Flemmi told jurors yesterday, Connolly had joked, "Hey, I'm one of the gang."

The once-decorated agent, who is already serving 10 years in prison for racketeering and is now on trial on murder charges, raised his eyebrows in apparent disbelief as he stared at the slightly built, 74-year-old man he had used as an informant against the New England Mafia.

Jurors, who heard from another hitman last week, John Martorano, barely flinched as Flemmi told them that he and fellow informant James "Whitey" Bulger generally paid Connolly twice a year: $5,000 when he was going on vacation and $10,000 for Christmas - with an additional kickback now and then when they made a big score.

The agent had a close relationship with Bulger and the two vacationed together in Acapulco and Provincetown, Flemmi said.

He said Bulger reduced Connolly's payoffs at one point out of concern the agent was too flamboyant, buying real estate on Cape Cod and dressing in fancy suits.

"One time we gave him money, he went and bought a boat," Flemmi said. "Jim Bulger was upset about that. He had to sell the boat. I mean, FBI agents weren't making much money back in those days. He was the best-dressed agent in the office and people would start looking at him. That was a con cern."

Flemmi said he and Bulger paid Connolly and four other agents from an expense fund, which came from criminal profits. One of those agents, John Morris, received immunity from prosecution and will testify later. The other three, John Newton, Nicholas Gianturco, and Michael Buckley, have never been charged and all have denied receiving money from the gangsters.

Connolly, 68, who retired from the FBI in 1990 after 22 years, is accused of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the 1982 slaying of Boston business consultant John B. Callahan. He is accused of warning Flemmi and Bulger that the FBI planned to question Callahan and that he would probably implicate the gangsters in an earlier slaying.

Bulger, who fled shortly before his 1995 racketeering indictment, remains on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list.

Flemmi, dressed in prison-issued khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt, occasionally chewed his bottom lip while testifying and sipped on orange juice. Connolly frequently frowned at Flemmi, who is serving a life sentence for 10 murders under a deal that spared him the death penalty.

He has pleaded guilty to killing eight men and two women between 1974 and 1985 but admitted yesterday that during Boston's 1960s gang wars he shot Charlestown gang leader Edward "Punchy" McLaughlin. He also said that in addition to those killings, he was involved in 10 other slayings - either participating or cleaning up afterward.

For the first time, Flemmi publicly described how he and Bulger formed the partnership that helped them become two of the most powerful gangsters in Boston. After teaming up with the Somerville-based Winter Hill Gang in the mid-'70s, Flemmi said, he and Bulger "kind of hit it off together because we both identified with each other's activities."

Both were physical fitness buffs who did not drink or smoke, he said.

"The rest of the guys were kind of party-type guys," Flemmi said. "We liked to party also, we weren't square - but we weren't extreme."

He said Bulger initially told the gang in 1975 that Connolly, who grew up in the same South Boston housing project as the Bulger family, was leaking information to him, Flemmi said.

Later that year, Flemmi said, Bulger introduced him to Connolly and asked him to provide information about local Mafia leaders.

Flemmi said he had easy access to local Mafia leaders and had declined several offers to join the mob. "I didn't trust them," he testified.

He added that Bulger, who could not join the Mafia because he was not Italian, did not trust the leaders either, and apparently the feeling was mutual.

"They didn't particularly like him because he was kind of a violent guy," Flemmi said. "He was his own person."

Flemmi said Connolly warned the pair in 1976 that Revere bookmaker Richard Castucci was an informant who had told the FBI where two fugitive Winter Hill Gang members were hiding in New York. Earlier, hitman-turned-government witness Martorano testified that he killed Castucci as a result of the tip.

In 1978, according to Flemmi, Connolly warned him and Bulger that most of the Winter Hill Gang was going to be indicted on federal race-fixing charges because one of the men involved in the scheme, Anthony Ciulla, was cooperating.

However, Flemmi said Connolly helped persuade a prosecutor to remove him and Bulger from the indictment, but insisted, "We had to give our word we wouldn't kill Tony Ciulla."

Flemmi said Connolly also told him and Bulger in 1982 that Edward "Brian" Halloran was an FBI informant who had implicated them in another slaying, prompting Bulger to kill Halloran.

After testifying for just under four hours, with breaks for recess and lunch, Flemmi said he was having difficulty focusing on the questions. At the prosecution's request, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Stanford Blake ushered the jury from the room and asked Flemmi, "Are you getting tired, or you didn't understand the question?"

"Both," said Flemmi, adding that he had not had much sleep since being moved from prison to an undisclosed jail on Wednesday. "How's the food there?" the judge asked.

"If I fed it to my dog, he'd bite me," Flemmi said.

The judge promptly halted the trial for the day. Flemmi will resume on the stand today.

Mob Informant Scandal Involved Highest Levels of FBI, Documents Show

2008-12-20T00:46:00.000-06:00

Mob Informant Scandal Involved Highest Levels of FBI, Documents Show

by Jeff Donn, Associated Press, 27 July 2002

BOSTON (AP) -- For more than 20 years, FBI headquarters in Washington knew that its Boston agents were using hit men and mob leaders as informants and shielding them from prosecution for serious crimes including murder, the Associated Press has learned.

Until now, the still-unraveling Boston FBI scandal has been portrayed largely as the work of a handful of local agents -- mavericks willing to deal with the devil to bring down a Mafia family.

But documents obtained by the AP directly connect FBI headquarters to a pattern of collusion with notorious killers.

The AP found 20 memos from Boston agents to the FBI director's office, along with six replies, showing that headquarters was told of the abuses and condoned them.

Written between 1964 and 1987, the memos made it clear to Washington that the informants had killed and were likely to kill again, describing one of them as "the most dangerous individual known" in the Boston area. The memos also alerted headquarters that two of the informants were crime bosses, active "at the policy-making level" of criminal enterprises in Boston.

Headquarters also knew that its Boston agents were shielding the informants from other investigative agencies. It knew that one informant who masterminded a murder was allowed to go free as four innocent men were sent to prison in his place.

J. Edgar Hoover, William Sessions and William Webster headed the FBI in the years when the memos were written. Hoover is dead; Webster and Sessions declined to be interviewed. It is unknown if any of them read the memos.

It is uncertain who at FBI headquarters did, but someone was paying attention. In the mostly unsigned responses found by the AP, the director's office welcomed the informants and praised their FBI field handlers.

A spokesman for the FBI in Washington declined to comment, citing ongoing investigations and lawsuits.

The AP found the memos in federal court files and in the records of a congressional committee investigating the abuses.

More than $1 billion in lawsuits have been brought against the government by victims of crimes committed by the informants while they were under FBI protection.

The roots of the scandal lie in the 1960s, when the FBI came under pressure from the public and Congress to crack down on the growing power of the Mafia.

In Boston, FBI agents responded by recruiting two hit men as informants and by forging an alliance with the Winter Hill Gang -- vicious thugs eager to seize control of the rackets from the Patriarca Mafia family.

The nature of the arrangement, as disclosed in recent criminal proceedings: In return for information on the Mafia, Boston agents looked the other way as the Winter Hill Gang sold drugs, stole and murdered, even tipping them off when state police or federal drug agents were on their trail.

Both sides got what they wanted. The Patriarca crime family was devastated by federal prosecutions, and the Winter Hill Gang took over Boston-area rackets.

The arrangement stayed secret until 1995, when Massachusetts state police and federal drug agents finally built a racketeering case against the Winter Hill Gang, and the story began to tumble out.

So far, one former FBI agent, John Connolly, has been convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice and awaits sentencing, and another was granted immunity for testimony. Both had accepted bribes from the informants they were protecting.

The Hit Men

Boston FBI agents recruiting Vincent J. Flemmi as an informant knew what he was from the start- and made sure the director's office did, too.

Flemmi spoke of "plans to become recognized as the No. One 'hit man' in this area," Boston agents told Washington in a June 4, 1964, memo.

At least four field memos informed headquarters that Flemmi planned to kill a small-time hoodlum, Edward "Teddy" Deegan, in a dispute over money.

Hours before the murder, Boston agents reported that mob enforcer Joseph "The Animal" Barboza, had joined the plot.

Deegan's body turned up in an alley in Chelsea, Mass., on March 12, 1965. A week later, a memo to headquarters named six men, including Flemmi and Barboza, as the killers and described the murder, right down to who fired the first shot.

But the bureau, it seemed, didn't want Flemmi in prison. It wanted him on the streets, as an informer.

On June 4, 1965, FBI records show, the director's office demanded a progress report. Was he ready to inform?

Yes, Boston replied, adding that Flemmi was suspected in eight murders and that "from all indications, he is going to continue to commit murder."

Soon, FBI memos show, agents also recruited Barboza, convincing him that his Mafia employers had turned on him.

In a June 20, 1967, memo, Boston agents told headquarters that Barboza was the most dangerous man in Boston -- "a professional assassin responsible for numerous homicides." He was also unreliable, Boston reported -- a man willing to encourage perjury to avoid a long prison term. He had also vowed never to incriminate his friend, Flemmi.

But with the promise of a light sentence for the Deegan murder, Barboza became star witness in three Mafia trials. A Massachusetts jury trusted his word and convicted six men in the Deegan case. Flemmi and two others identified as the killers in the memos to FBI headquarters were never charged.

Instead, FBI files show, the bureau stood by as Barboza's false testimony convicted four men who were innocent of the murder. Two died in prison. The others were released in recent years, exonerated when the scandal finally broke.

Barboza had implicated two of them to settle street grudges. The other two were known mob figures.

After the convictions, a July 31, 1968, field memo requested commendations for Barboza's handlers. Hoover sent a personal reply:

"The successful prosecution of these subjects was a direct result of your noteworthy development of pertinent witnesses."

In return for his testimony, Barboza was released after five months and relocated with a new identity.

Before long, however, he was threatening to recant his testimony unless given $9,000 for plastic surgery to change his appearance.

If Barboza recanted, convictions "might be overturned and plunge the government into protracted and acrimonious litigation," federal prosecutors Edward F. Harrington and Walter T. Barnes warned their supervisor in Washington. In their Feb. 12, 1970 memo, they urged that Barboza be given the money.

Six months later, Barboza did recant -- but soon changed his mind and stood by his original story.

Barnes, now retired, said that, as best he can recall, some money was approved for Barboza. At the time, he had no reason to believe Barboza's testimony was false, he said. Harrington, now a federal judge in Massachusetts, declined comment.

In 1976, the New England Mafia found Barboza and exacted its revenge, shotgunning him on a San Francisco street.

Flemmi died in prison in 1979 after Massachusetts authorities convicted him of attempted murder in another case.

The Bosses

James J. "Whitey" Bulger and Vincent Flemmi's big brother, Stephen, nicknamed "The Rifleman," were just rising in the crime world when Boston agents recruited them as informants. Agents told headquarters what kind of men they were.

On Feb. 8, 1967, for example, Boston agents told the director's office that Stephen Flemmi was being upgraded to a "top echelon" informant -- even though he was "suspect of possibly being involved in gangland slayings."

By 1981, the bureau had adopted new rules saying that informants "shall not participate in acts of violence" or "initiate a plan to commit criminal acts."

Yet in 1983, when Bulger was upgraded to "top echelon," a field memo said he was "the titular head of the Winter Hill mob and as such sits as an equal at the policy-making level" with New England Mafia leaders.

Throughout the 1980s, state police tried to build a case against Stephen Flemmi and Bulger, but the pair was always one step ahead of them. The reason: Boston agents tipped them off, testimony in recent criminal cases has revealed.

There is evidence that FBI headquarters sometimes lent a hand.

In 1983, FBI agents in Oklahoma suspected the pair in the murder of Roger Wheeler, the head of World Jai Alai, who was shot in Tulsa after discovering that someone was skimming money from his business.

When Oklahoma agents sought to question Bulger and Stephen Flemmi, Robert Fitzpatrick, then deputy chief of the bureau's Boston office, blocked the interrogations.

He was instructed to do so during a meeting in Washington with top FBI officials, Fitzpatrick told the AP.

"It was to protect Whitey Bulger," said Fitzpatrick, now retired.

However, even the FBI could not protect the informers forever.

Today, Stephen Flemmi is serving 10 years for obstructing justice and other offenses. He awaits trial on federal racketeering charges linking him to 10 murders.

Tipped by an FBI agent, Bulger fled and remains at large. He is under indictment for racketeering and blamed, with his gang, for 21 killings -- 11 while he was an informant.

FBI

2008-12-17T15:13:00.000-06:00

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

The (FBI) is the primary investigative arm of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), serving as both a federal criminal investigative body and a domestic intelligence agency. At present, the FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crimes, making the FBI the de-facto lead law enforcement agency of the United States government.[2] The motto of the bureau is "Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity," corresponding to the "FBI" initialism.

The FBI headquarters is in Washington, D.C., and there are also 56 field offices located in major cities throughout the United States as well as over 400 resident agencies in smaller cities and towns across the nation, and more than 50 international offices, called "Legal Attachés," in U.S. embassies worldwide.

Mission and priorities
Legal authority
History
Organization
BOI and FBI directors
Publications
Crime statistics
Uniform Crime Reports
National Incident Based Reporting System
Media portrayal
Criticism
FBI files on specific persons

Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

2008-12-17T14:32:00.000-06:00

By TIM WEINER
Published: December 23, 2007, NY Times
Correction Appended

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.

Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, has been a fundamental principle of law for seven centuries. The Bush administration’s decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for Congress and the Supreme Court today.

The Constitution says habeas corpus shall not be suspended “unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.” The plan proposed by Hoover, the head of the F.B.I. from 1924 to 1972, stretched that clause to include “threatened invasion” or “attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an “unlawful enemy combatant.”

But the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right of American citizens to seek a writ of habeas corpus. This month the court heard arguments on whether about 300 foreigners held at Guantánamo Bay had the same rights. It is expected to rule by next summer.

Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.

Hoover’s plan called for “the permanent detention” of the roughly 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons. The F.B.I., he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow.

So the bureau had arranged for “detention in military facilities of the individuals apprehended” in those states, he wrote.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have been a panel made up of one judge and two citizens. But the hearings “will not be bound by the rules of evidence,” his letter noted.

The only modern precedent for Hoover’s plan was the Palmer Raids of 1920, named after the attorney general at the time. The raids, executed in large part by Hoover’s intelligence division, swept up thousands of people suspected of being communists and radicals.

Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s “security index” of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans “who might be dangerous” if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people.

Hoover’s July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney W. Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, President Truman vetoed as unconstitutional a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency, but Congress voted overwhelmingly to override his veto and approve it. Truman did declare such an emergency in December 1950, after China entered the Korean War. But no known evidence suggests he or any other president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal.

Correction: January 5, 2008--An article on Dec. 23 about a newly declassified plan by J. Edgar Hoover, when he was director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and imprison Americans suspected of disloyalty misstated the process by which the Internal Security Act of 1950, also known as the McCarran Act, became law. President Truman vetoed the measure as unconstitutional, but Congress voted overwhelmingly to override his veto and the measure then became law; Truman did not sign the bill.

Hoover's Letter

From the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Hoover) to the President's Special Consultant (Sidney Souers, former Director of Central Intelligence)

Washington, July 7, 1950

My Dear Admiral:

For some months representatives of the FBI and of the Department of Justice have been formulating a plan of action for an emergency situation wherein it would be necessary to apprehend and detain persons who are potentially dangerous to the internal security of the country. I thought you would be interested in a brief outline of the plan.

Action to Be Taken By the Department of Justice

The plan envisions four types of emergency situations: (1) attack upon the United States; (2) threatened invasion; (3) attack upon United States troops in legally occupied territory; and (4) rebellion.

The plan contains a prepared document which should be referred to the President immediately upon the existence of one of the emergency situations for the President's signature. Briefly, this proclamation recites the existence of the emergency situation and that in order to immediately protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage the Attorney General is instructed to apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous to the internal security.

In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus for apprehensions made pursuant to it. The plan also contains a prepared joint resolution to be passed by Congress and an Executive Order for the President which too will validate the previous Presidential proclamation.

The next step in the plan is a prepared order from the Attorney General to the Director of the FBI to apprehend dangerous individuals, conduct necessary searches and seize contraband as defined in the plan. Together with the order to the Director of the FBI the Attorney General will forward a master warrant attached to a list of names of individuals which names have previously been furnished from time to time to the Attorney General by the FBI as being individuals who are potentially dangerous to the internal security.

It should be pointed out that the plan does not distinguish between aliens and citizens and both are included in its purview. If for some reason the full plan is not put into operation it has so been drawn that the section applicable only to alien enemies may be put into effect.

Action to Be Taken By the FBI

For a long period of time the FBI has been accumulating the names, identities and activities of individuals found to be potentially dangerous to the internal security through investigation. These names have been compiled in an index which index has been kept up to date. The names in this index are the ones that have been furnished to the Department of Justice and will be attached to the master warrant referred to above. This master warrant will, therefore, serve as legal authority for the FBI to cause the apprehension and detention of the individuals maintained in this index.

The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States. Immediately upon receipt of instructions and the master warrant from the Attorney General the various FBI Field Divisions will be instructed by expeditious means to cause the apprehension of the individuals within their various territories. Each FBI Field Division maintains an index of the individuals within its territory, which index is so arranged that it may be used for ready apprehension purposes. Upon apprehension the individuals will be delivered to the nearest jail for temporary detention and action by the Attorney General.

Detention and Subsequent Procedures

The permanent detention of these individuals will take place in regularly established Federal detention facilities. These facilities have been confidentially surveyed and the facilities have been found to be adequate in all areas except in the territory covered by the FBI's New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco Offices. In these three areas arrangements have been perfected with the National Military Establishment for the temporary and permanent detention in Military facilities of the individuals apprehended.

The plan calls for a statement of charges to be served on each detainee and a hearing be afforded the individual within a specified period. The Hearing Board will consist of three members to be appointed by the Attorney General composed of one Judge of the United States or State Court and two citizens. The hearing procedure will give the detainee an opportunity to know why he is being detained and permit him to introduce material in the nature of evidence in his own behalf. The hearing procedure will not be bound by the rules of evidence.

The Hearing Board may make one of three recommendations, that is; that the individual be detained, paroled or released. This action by the Board is subject to review by the Attorney General and the Attorney General's decision on the matter will be final except for appeal to the President.

The details of this plan as set forth in this communication have also been furnished on this date to Mr. James S. Lay, Jr., Executive Secretary, National Security Council.

With expressions of my highest esteem and best regards,

Sincerely yours,

J. Edgar Hoover

Palmer Raids

2008-12-17T14:11:00.000-06:00

The Palmer Raids were a series of controversial raids by the United States Department of Justice and Immigration and Naturalization Service from 1919 to 1921 on suspected radical leftists in the United States. The raids are named for Alexander Mitchell Palmer, United States Attorney General under Woodrow Wilson.

Background

The crackdown on radical left-wing political groups had actually begun during World War I. After a series of bomb attacks of court buildings, police stations, churches and homes attributed to violent immigrant anarchist groups, the Department of Justice and its small Bureau of Investigation (BOI) (predecessor to the FBI) had begun to track their activities with the approval of President Woodrow Wilson.

In 1915, Wilson warned of:

Hyphenated Americans (who) have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty and anarchy must be crushed out.[1]

Handicapped by the secrecy of these groups and limited Federal law enforcement capabilities, the Bureau of Investigation significantly increased its workload on anarchist movements after 1917 when the Galleanists (followers of Luigi Galleani) and other radical groups commenced a new series of bomb attacks in several major American cities.[2][3][4][5] The Russian Revolution of 1917 was also a background factor: many anarchists believed that the worker's revolution there would quickly spread across Europe and the United States.

On June 15, 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act. The law set punishments for acts of interference in foreign policy and espionage. The act authorized stiff fines and prison terms of up to 20 years for anyone who obstructed the military draft or encouraged "disloyalty" against the U.S. government. After two anarchist radicals, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, continued to advocate against conscription, Goldman's offices at Mother Earth were thoroughly searched, and volumes of files and detailed subscription lists from Mother Earth, along with Berkman's journal The Blast, were seized. As a Justice Department news release reported:

A wagon load of anarchist records and propaganda material was seized, and included in the lot is what is believed to be a complete registry of anarchy's friends in the United States. A splendidly kept card index was found, which the Federal agents believe will greatly simplify their task of identifying persons mentioned in the various record books and papers. The subscription lists of Mother Earth and The Blast, which contain 10,000 names, were also seized.

Congress also passed a series of immigration, anti-anarchist, and sedition acts (including the Sedition Act of 1918 and the Anarchist Exclusion Act) that sought to either criminalize or punish (through deportation) advocacy of the violent overthrow of the government or desertion from the armed forces, defiance of the draft, or membership in anarchist or revolutionary organizations.

In 1919, the U.S. House of Representatives refused to seat Socialist representative Victor L. Berger from Wisconsin because of his socialism, German ancestry, and anti-war views.

On June 2, 1919, several bombs were detonated by Galleanist anarchists in eight American cities, including one in Washington, D.C., that damaged the home of newly appointed Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The same bomb detonated near Franklin Roosevelt who lived across the street and was walking home with his wife. Palmer was badly shaken up (the bomber, Carlo Valdonoci, was killed by the bomb, which exploded prematurely).[6] All of the bombs were delivered with a flyer reading:

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.[7]

Palmer, twice the intended victim of assassination, had a personal as well as public motivation to win the battle against the radical left and those preaching violence. [8] After his close calls at the hands of the Galleanists, he appears to have grouped all those identified with the radical left as enemies of the United States. He stated his belief that Communism was "eating its way into the homes of the American workman," and that socialists were responsible for most of the country's social problems.

Calls from the press and a worried public quickly escalated for the federal government to take action against those perpetrating the violence. Pressure to take action intensified after anarchists, communists and other radical groups called on draft-age males to refuse conscription and/or registration for the army, and for troops already serving to desert the armed forces. President Wilson ordered Attorney General Palmer to take action.

At the time, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Luigi Galleani were in the forefront of the anti-conscription movement. Valdonoci, the Palmer house bomber, was later identified as a militant follower of Luigi Galleani. Attorney General Palmer requested and received a massive supplementary increase in Congressional appropriations in order to put a stop to the violence. Palmer then ordered the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Investigation to prepare for what would become known as the Palmer Raids.

Raids

In 1919, J. Edgar Hoover was put in charge of a new division of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, the General Intelligence Division. By October 1919, Hoover's division had collected 150,000 names in a rapidly expanding index. Using this information, starting on November 7, 1919, BOI agents, together with local police, orchestrated a series of well-publicized raids against suspected radicals and foreigners, using the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. Palmer and his agents were accused of using torture and other controversial methods of obtaining intelligence and collecting evidence on radicals, including informers and wiretaps.

Victor L. Berger was sentenced to 20 years in prison on a charge of sedition, although the Supreme Court of the United States later overturned that conviction. The radical anarchist Luigi Galleani and eight of his Galleanist adherents were deported in June 1919 under the provisons of the Anarchist Exclusion Act, three weeks after the June 2 wave of bombings. Although authorities did not have enough evidence to arrest Galleani for the bombings, they could deport him because he was a resident alien who had overtly encouraged the violent overthrow of the government, was a known associate of Carlo Valdonoci and had authored an explicit how-to bomb making manual titled La Salute é in Voi (The Health is Within You), used by other Galleanists to construct some of their package bombs.

In December 1919, Palmer's agents gathered 249 people of Russian origin, including well-known radical leaders such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, and placed them on a ship bound for the Soviet Union (The Buford, called the Soviet Ark by the press). In January 1920, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the Industrial Workers of the World union. During one of the raids, more than 4,000 individuals were rounded up in a single night. By January 1920, Palmer and the Department of Justice had organized the largest mass arrests in U.S. history, rounding up at least 10,000 individuals.

Louis Freeland Post, then Assistant Secretary of Labor, [9] cancelled more than 2000 of these warrants as being illegal.[10] Of the many thousands arrested, 556 people were eventually deported under the 1918 Anarchist Act.[11]

For most of 1919 and early 1920, much of the public sided with Palmer, but this soon changed. Palmer announced that an attempted Communist revolution was certain to take place in the U.S. on May 1, 1920 (May Day). No such revolution took place on May 1, leading to criticism of Palmer.[12] However, on September 16 of that year the Wall Street bombing by Galleanist anarchists killed thirty-eight persons and wounded 400; it was the deadliest bombing attack to date in the United States.

On May 28, 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report entitled Report of the Illegal Practices of the United States Department of Justice which carefully documented unlawful Departmental authorization of the arrests of suspected radicals, illegal entrapment by agent provocateurs and unlawful incommunicado detention. The report was signed by prominent lawyers and law professors, including Felix Frankfurter, Roscoe Pound and Ernst Freund. Palmer was called before the House Rules Committee and strongly defended his actions and that of his department, saying "I apologize for nothing that the Department of Justice has done in this matter. I glory in it."[13][14]

In June 1920, Judge George Anderson effectively ended the raids when he ordered the discharge of twenty aliens, and denounced Department of Justice actions. The discovery of trumped-up charges and the Daugherty-Burns scandal turned public opinion against further large-scale arrests and searches, though subsequent bomb attacks and public clamor to punish the radicals believed responsible did not subside.[15][16] Palmer, once seen as a likely presidential candidate, lost the nomination.[13] For their part, the Galleanists continued their violent bombing campaign, which would last another twelve years.[17]

References

Further reading

Avrich, Paul, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1996)

Manning, Lona, 9/16/20: Terrorists Bomb Wall Street, Crime Magazine, January 15, 2006
Hill, Robert A. Compiler and Editor, The FBI's RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War I. Ithaca, N. Y.: Northeastern University Press (May 1, 1995). ISBN 1-55553-227-6.

Kornweibel, Theodore, Jr. "Investigate Everything": Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty During World War I. 416 pages. Indiana University Press (May 1, 2002). ISBN 0-253-34009-8.
Kornweibel, Theodore, Jr. Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 Blacks in the Diaspora Series. 248 pages. Indiana University Press (December 1, 1999). ISBN 0-253-21354-1.

McCormick, Charles H., Hopeless Cases: The Hunt for the Red Scare Terrorist Bombers, University Press of America (2005), ISBN 0761831339, 9780761831334

J. Edgar Hoover

2008-12-17T13:46:00.000-06:00

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
John Edgar Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover, was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.

Hoover was highly regarded by much of the U.S. public, but throughout his career and after his death he became an increasingly controversial figure. His many critics assert that he abused his power and exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI.[1] He is known to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to have amassed secret files on political leaders[2] and to have used illegal methods to collect evidence.[3] It is because of Hoover's long and controversial reign that FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.[4]

Early life and education

Hoover was born New Year's Day in 1895 in Washington, D.C., to Anna Marie Scheitlin and Dickerson Naylor Hoover, Sr., and grew up in the Eastern Market section of the city. Few details are known of his early years; his birth certificate was not filed until 1938. What little is known about his upbringing generally can be traced back to a single 1937 profile by journalist Jack Alexander. Hoover was educated at The George Washington University, graduating in 1917 with a law degree. During his time there, he worked at the Library of Congress [5] and also became a member of Kappa Alpha Order (Alpha Nu 1914). While a law student, Hoover became interested in the career of Anthony Comstock, the New York City U.S. Postal Inspector, who waged prolonged campaigns against fraud and vice (as well as pornography and information on birth control) a generation earlier. Hoover is thought to have studied Comstock's methods and modeled his early career on Comstock's reputation for relentless pursuit and occasional procedural violations in crime fighting.

FBI career

During World War I, Hoover found work with the Justice Department. He soon proved himself capable and was promoted to head of the Enemy Aliens Registration Section. In 1919, he became head of the new General Intelligence Division of the Justice Department (see the Palmer Raids). From there, in 1921, he joined the Bureau of Investigation as deputy head, and in 1924, the Attorney General made him the acting director. On May 10, 1924, Hoover was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to be the sixth director of the Bureau of Investigation, following President Warren Harding's death and in response to allegations that the prior director, William J. Burns, was involved in the financial scandal(s) of the Harding administration. When Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, it had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents.

Hoover was noted as sometimes being capricious in his leadership; he frequently fired FBI agents by singling out those who he thought "looked stupid like truck drivers" or he considered to be "pinheads."[7] He also relocated agents who had displeased him to career-ending assignments and locations. Melvin Purvis was a prime example; he was one of the more effective agents in capturing and breaking up 1930s gangs and received substantial public recognition, but a jealous Hoover maneuvered him out of the FBI.[8]

Gangster wars

In the early thirties, there was an epidemic of bank robberies in the Midwest orchestrated by colorful criminal gangs who took advantage of superior firepower and fast get-away cars to bedevil local law enforcement agencies. To the chagrin and increasing discomfort of authorities, such robbers were often viewed as somewhat noble in their assaults upon the banking industry, which at the time was evicting many farmers from their homesteads. That empathy reached the point that many of these desperadoes, particularly the dashing John Dillinger (who became famous for leaping over bank cages and his repeated escapes from jails and police traps), were de facto folk heroes whose exploits frequently captured headlines. State officials began to implore Washington to aid them in containing this lawlessness. The fact that the robbers frequently took stolen cars across state lines (a federal offense) gave Hoover and his men the authority to pursue them. Things did not go as planned, however, and there were some embarrassing foul-ups on the part of the FBI, particularly clashes with the Dillinger gang.

A raid on a summer lodge named "Little Bohemia" in Manitowish Waters, Wisconsin, left an agent and a hapless civilian bystander dead, along with others wounded. All the gangsters escaped. Hoover realized that his job was now on the line, and he pulled out all stops to capture the culprits. Hoover was particularly fixated on eliminating Dillinger, whose misdeeds he considered to be insults aimed directly at him and "his" bureau. In late July 1934, Melvin Purvis, the Director of Operations in the Chicago office, received a tip on the whereabouts of John Dillinger. That paid off when the gangster was cut down in a hail of gunfire outside the Biograph Theater.

Because of several highly-publicized captures or shootings of outlaws and bank robbers including Dillinger, Alvin Karpis, and Machine Gun Kelly, the Bureau's powers were broadened and it was re-named the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935. In 1939, the FBI became pre-eminent in the field of domestic intelligence. Hoover made changes, such as expanding and combining fingerprint files in the Identification Division to compile the largest collection of fingerprints ever.[9][10]

Hoover also helped to greatly expand the FBI's recruitment and create the FBI Laboratory, a division established in 1932 to examine evidence found by the FBI.

Investigation of subversion and radicals

Hoover was concerned about subversion, and under his leadership, the FBI spied upon tens of thousands of suspected subversives and radicals. Hoover tended to exaggerate the dangers of subversives, and many times overstepped his bounds in his pursuit of eliminating that perceived threat.[11]

The FBI had some successes against actual subversives and spies. For example, in the Quirin affair during World War II, German U-boats set two small groups of Nazi agents ashore in Florida and Long Island to cause acts of sabotage within the country. Although the members of these teams were apprehended, this was due entirely to the fact that one of the would-be saboteurs went to the FBI and confessed.[12] Nevertheless, President Harry Truman wrote in his memoirs: "The country had reason to be proud of and have confidence in our security agencies. They had kept us almost totally free of sabotage and espionage during the World War II".[1]

Another example of Hoover's concern over subversion is his handling of the Venona Project. The FBI inherited a pre-World War II joint project with the British to eavesdrop on Soviet spies in the UK and the United States. Hoover kept the intercepts — America's greatest counterintelligence secret — in a locked safe in his office, choosing not to inform Truman, his Attorney General McGraith, or two Secretaries of State — Dean Acheson and General George Marshall — while they held office. He informed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the Venona Project in 1952.

According to documents declassified in 2007, Hoover maintained a list of 12,000 Americans suspected of disloyalty with the intention of detaining them and to do so by suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Hoover submitted his plan to President Harry Truman at the outbreak of the Korean War, but there is no evidence that Truman accepted the plan.[13]

COINTELPRO years

In 1956, Hoover was becoming increasingly frustrated by Supreme Court decisions that limited the Justice Department's ability to prosecute people for their political opinions, most notably, Communists. At this time he formalized a covert "dirty tricks" program under the name COINTELPRO.[14] This program remained in place until it was revealed to the public in 1971, and was the cause of some of the harshest criticism of Hoover and the FBI. COINTELPRO was first used to disrupt the Communist Party, and later such organizations such as the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s SCLC, the Ku Klux Klan, and others. Its methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents and spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations.[15] Some authors have charged that COINTELPRO methods also included inciting violence and arranging murders.[16] In 1975, the activities of COINTELPRO were investigated by the "United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities" called the Church Committee after its chairman, Senator Frank Church (D-ID) and these activities were declared illegal and contrary to the Constitution.[17]

Hoover amassed significant power by collecting files containing large amounts of compromising and potentially embarrassing information on many powerful people, especially politicians. According to Laurence Silberman, appointed Deputy Attorney General in early 1974, Director Clarence M. Kelley thought such files either did not exist or had been destroyed. After The Washington Post broke a story in January 1975, Kelley searched and found them in his outer office. The House Judiciary Committee then demanded that Silberman testify about them. An extensive investigation of Hoover's files by David Garrow showed that Hoover and next-in-command William Sullivan, as well as the FBI itself as an agency, were responsible.

In 1956, several years before he targeted King, Hoover had a public showdown with T.R.M. Howard, a civil rights leader from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. During a national speaking tour, Howard had criticized the FBI's failure to thoroughly investigate the racially-motivated murders of George W. Lee, Lamar Smith, and Emmett Till. Hoover not only wrote an open letter to the press singling out these statements as "irresponsible" but secretly enlisted the help of NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall in a campaign to discredit Howard.

Response to Mafia and civil rights groups

In the 1950s, evidence of Hoover's unwillingness to focus FBI resources on the Mafia became grist for the media and his many detractors, after famed muckraker Jack Anderson exposed the immense scope of the Mafia's organized crime network, a threat Hoover had long downplayed. Hoover's retaliation and continual harassment of Anderson lasted into the 1970s. Hoover has also been accused of trying to undermine the reputations of members of the civil rights movement. His alleged treatment of actress Jean Seberg and Martin Luther King, Jr. are two such examples.

Hoover personally directed the FBI investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report in 1979 critical of the performance by the FBI, the Warren Commission as well as other agencies. The report also criticized what it characterized as the FBI's reluctance to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the president.[18]

Late career and death

Presidents Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson each considered firing Hoover but concluded that the political cost of doing so would be too great.[19]

Hoover maintained strong support in Congress until his death in 1972 from the effects of high blood pressure.[20] Operational command of the Bureau passed to Associate Director Clyde Tolson. Soon thereafter, President Nixon appointed L. Patrick Gray, a Justice Department official with no FBI experience, as Acting Director, with W. Mark Felt remaining as Associate Director.

Legacy

Hoover was a consultant to Warner Brothers on a 1959 theatrical film about the FBI, The FBI Story, and in 1965 on Warner Brothers' long-running spin-off television series, The F.B.I.. Hoover personally made sure that Warner Brothers would portray the FBI more favorably than other crime dramas of the times.

In 1979, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) under Senator Richard Schweiker, which had re-opened the investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, reported that Hoover's FBI "failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President." The HSCA further reported that Hoover's FBI "was deficient in its sharing of information with other agencies and departments." As a result, various conspiracy theories abound regarding the negligence of Hoover's leadership in performing due diligence with regard to the JFK assassination.[21]

The FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. is named after Hoover. Because of the controversial nature of Hoover's legacy, there have been periodic proposals to rename it. In 2001, Senator Harry Reid sponsored an amendment to strip Hoover's name from the building. "J. Edgar Hoover's name on the FBI building is a stain on the building," Reid said.[22] The amendment was not adopted by the Senate.

Writings

J. Edgar Hoover was the nominal author of a number of books and articles. Although it is widely believed that all of these were ghostwritten by FBI employees,[39] Hoover received the credit and royalties.

Hoover, J. Edgar (1938). Persons In Hiding. Gaunt Publishing. ISBN 1-56169-340-5. http://books.google.com/books?id=zSEiAAAAMAAJ&q.
Hoover, J. Edgar (1958). Masters of Deceit: The Story of Communism in America and How to Fight It. Kessinger Publishing. ISBN 1-4254-8258-9. http://books.google.com/books?id=U503AAAAIAAJ&q. [40]
Hoover, J. Edgar (1962). A Study of Communism. Holt Rinehart & Winston. ISBN 0-03-031190-X. http://books.google.com/books?id=8Jk3AAAAIAAJ&q.

Footnotes

References and further reading

Beverly, William (2003). On the Lam; Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 1-57806-537-2.
Charles, Douglas (2007). J. Edgar Hoover and the Anti-interventionists: FBI Political Surveillance and the Rise of the Domestic Security State, 1939-1945. Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0814210611.
Garrow, David J. (1981). The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., From 'Solo' to Memphis. W.W.Norton. ISBN 0-393-01509-2.
Gentry, Curt (1991). J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. Plume. ISBN 0-452-26904-0.
Lowenthal, Max (1950). The Federal Bureau of Investigation. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 0837157552.
Powers, Richard Gid (1986). Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover. Free Press. ISBN 0029250609.
Schott, Joseph L (1975). No Left Turns: The FBI in Peace & War. Praeger. ISBN 0-275-33630-1.
Stove, Robert J. (2003). The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims. Encounter Books. ISBN 1-893554-66-X.
Summers, Anthony (2003). Official and Confidential:The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover. Putnam Publishing Group. ISBN 0-399-13800-5.
Theoharis, Athan (1993). From the Secret Files of J. Edgar Hoover. Ivan R. Dee. ISBN 1-56663-017-7.

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: J. Edgar Hoover

External links

StraightDope.com – 'The Straight Dope: Was J. Edgar Hoover a crossdresser?'
Time.com - 'The Truth about Hoover', December 22, 1975
Wall Street Journal – 'Hoover's Institution', Laurence H. Silberman, July 20, 2005
Assassination Records Review Board – Final Report: 1998
Zpub.com – 'J. Edgar Hoover Biography'
Yardley, Jonathan (2004). "'No Left Turns': The G-Man's Tour de Force". A review of the book "No Left Turns". Washington Post.

The essential lessons of the Rosenberg case

2008-10-06T11:57:00.000-05:00

The essential lessons of the Rosenberg case
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-meeropol5-2008oct05,0,7305640.story

The couple's sons say those in power manufactured evidence and targeted their parents, making them the focus of the public's Cold War fear and anger.

By Michael Meeropol and Robert Meeropol

October 5, 2008

We are the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. We were young children -- 10 and 6 years old, respectively -- when our parents were put to death in the electric chair at Sing Sing for passing the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

For many years after that, we believed our parents to be wholly innocent of the charges against them. But over the years, and especially as further evidence became available at the end of the Cold War, we began to question that belief.

Now, 55 years after their execution, two recent revelations in our parents' case have again rekindled fierce debate about their culpability. But in our opinion, these disclosures -- the release of our aunt's sworn statements to a grand jury and a surprise new admission by our parents' codefendant -- have obscured both the essence and the essential lessons of the Rosenberg case.

Many Americans now living were not born when our parents stood trial in 1951 for conspiracy to commit espionage, so they may not understand why this case remains one of our nation's most sensational courtroom dramas. The reason is that, at the height of the Cold War, two people were executed for allegedly giving the secret of the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

Viewed through the lens of 1950s America, it appeared to many that the Rosenbergs had given our archenemy the means to destroy our nation. The trial judge justified the death sentences by pronouncing that our parents made it possible for the Soviets to build their bomb earlier than expected, causing the Korean War and the deaths of thousands of American soldiers. "I consider your crime worse than murder," said the judge as he sentenced our parents to death. "Plain deliberate contemplated murder is dwarfed in magnitude by comparison with the crime you have committed."

But was that true? Had they in fact passed the so-called secret of the atomic bomb to the Russians? We have acknowledged for a long time the possibility that our father may have engaged in non-atomic espionage. The recent statement by our parents' codefendant, Morton Sobell, confirms exactly that, and several weeks ago we stated publicly for the first time that we now believe that our father did, in fact, participate in passing along military information.

But Sobell's recent admission sheds no light on whether our father in fact stole the secret of the atomic bomb, the crime for which he was executed. To this day, there is no credible evidence that he participated in obtaining or passing on any such secret.

In contrast, the newly released grand jury transcript does provide interesting new information about the case.

At the start of the investigation against our parents, David and Ruth Greenglass, our mother's brother and sister-in-law, confessed to being part of an atomic spy ring and cooperated with the prosecution in exchange for no charges being brought against Ruth and a comparatively light sentence for David.

Ruth's trial testimony provided the one key piece of evidence that led to our mother's conviction and subsequent execution. She testified at trial that our mother typed up notes that contained the "secret" of the atomic bomb, provided, supposedly, by David, a U.S. Army sergeant with only a high school education, who was assigned as a machinist to the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

However, the newly released transcript reveals that Ruth Greenglass' grand jury testimony included nothing about our mother typing any espionage notes. The only notes mentioned in Ruth's testimony were ones she wrote herself, which described the buildings at Los Alamos, not the atomic bomb.

It was not until February 1951, months after her grand jury testimony, that Ruth gave a new statement in which she reported (we would say "invented"), for the first time, the allegation that our mother had typed David's handwritten notes describing the atomic bomb. Confronted with Ruth's revisions, David Greenglass then contradicted his earlier statement to the FBI in which he had denied our mother's participation in espionage activities. Subsequently, David and Ruth both testified at the trial that our mother had typed notes about the secret of the atomic bomb.

In another stunning discrepancy, there is no mention in Ruth's grand jury testimony of an alleged meeting described by David and Ruth at the trial, during which David supposedly handed over the "secret of the atom bomb sketch" -- trial Exhibit 8 -- to Julius. Exhibit 8 was the main evidence for the government's contention that Julius successfully stole such a secret. If there is no mention of the meeting in David's grand jury testimony (which has yet to be released but which is essential to obtain), the core of the government's case against both of our parents will be dealt a crippling blow.

Some commentators have, in essence, said that neither this lack of evidence nor these inconsistencies matter. "The Rosenbergs were Soviet spies, and not minor ones either," wrote Ronald Radosh in these pages on Sept. 17.

Evidently, in Radosh's eyes, our mother remains a spy even though the new information indicates that the evidence against her was fabricated, and our father succeeded in passing vitally important data even though there is no clear proof to this day of the value of the military/industrial information that he, Sobell or others transmitted.

Radosh's arguments also divert attention from the most important problem of all: The U.S. government executed two people for stealing the secret of the atomic bomb -- a crime it knew they did not commit.

The central lesson of this episode is that our government abused its power in dangerous ways that remain relevant today. Those in power targeted our parents, making them the focus of the public's Cold War-era fear and anger. They manufactured testimony and evidence. They arrested our mother simply as leverage to get our father to cooperate.

They used the ultimate weapon -- the threat of death -- to try to extort a confession. They created the myth that there was a key "secret" of the atomic bomb, and then devised a strategy to make it appear that our father had sought and passed on that "secret." They executed our father when he refused to collaborate in this lie. They executed our mother as well, even though they knew that she was not an active participant in any espionage activities.

This case provides a crucial warning about the tendencies of our government to manufacture and exploit public fear, to trample civil rights and to manipulate judicial proceedings. In our current political climate, the targets being vilified have changed, but the tactics of those in power remain much the same.

Michael Meeropol is chairman of the economics department at Western New England College in Springfield, Mass. Robert Meeropol is the founder and executive director of the Rosenberg Fund for Children ( www.rfc.org).

Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI'S Use of Murderers as Informants

2008-10-05T18:17:00.000-05:00

Congressional Reports: H. Rpt. 108-414
Everything Secret Degenerates: The FBI'S Use of Murderers as Informants
Vols. 1 & 2

This Report by the House Committee on Government Reform discusses the consequences of the FBI's use of murderers as informants in New England. It focuses mainly on the 1965 murder of Edward ‘‘Teddy’’ Deegan,and the actions of federal law enforcement officials to protect cooperating witnesses and informants.

Volume 1 (57.4MB, 1,802 pages) and Volume 2 (73.8MB, 1,716 pages ) of the Report are available as a ZIP files. Click here to access PDF format.

F.B.I. Found to Violate Its Informant Rules

2008-10-05T16:45:00.000-05:00

NY Times
September 13, 2005
F.B.I. Found to Violate Its Informant Rules
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has often violated internal guidelines in its handling of confidential informants, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded Monday.

In nearly 9 of every 10 cases reviewed by the inspector general, guidelines on the handling of confidential informants were violated in ways that risked compromising investigations, according to a 301-page report by the office of Glenn A. Fine, the inspector general at the Justice Department.

The guidelines sometimes permit informants like drug dealers or gang members to commit crimes to further an investigation. But F.B.I. agents sometimes allowed criminal informants to engage in criminal activities without getting needed approval from supervisors or lawyers for such operations, failed to report unauthorized illegal activity, or approved such illegal activity only retroactively, the review found.

Bureau supervisors were often unfamiliar with the rules that applied to the handling of confidential informants - a reflection, the inspector general's report said, of "inadequate training at every level." And when violations were found, bureau agents and supervisors were often not held accountable for missteps, the review found.

The F.B.I. considers the use of confidential informants, who often have criminal ties, to be critical to its ability to penetrate drug trafficking organizations, gangs, gambling operations and terrorist circles.

In 2001, Janet Reno, then the attorney general, imposed toughened requirements on the F.B.I.'s use of informants in the wake of several embarrassing episodes - most notably, its handling of the Boston gangster James Bulger, who fled in 1995 after a bureau agent tipped him off to a pending indictment against him.

In May 2002, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, amended the informant rules as part of a broader restructuring of F.B.I. policies aimed at allowing agents to respond more quickly and flexibly to leads in terrorism and criminal investigations.

The F.B.I. said Monday in response to the inspector general's report that it was working to improve compliance with guidelines for the handling of confidential informants and had already moved to make some internal changes recommended by Mr. Fine's office. Part of the problem, F.B.I. officials acknowledged, was the bureau's continued difficulty in building a modern computer system to help oversee the informant program and ensure better compliance.

"Even before the inspector general's review, we realized that we had to do some re-engineering of our whole human source program," Kevin R. Brock, an assistant F.B.I. director who oversees the program, said in an interview. "We were handling more and more sources, we had more and more regulations that we added on over the years, and we weren't doing the follow-up quality control on our own."

The constant flux "just created a situation where it was tough for the working agent to keep track of all this stuff," Mr. Brock said.

"Agents are failing to do certain things not because of mal-intent but just the press of administrative requirements, and overlooking them," he said.

Beyond the problems in managing confidential informants, the inspector general's review looked at the effect of a number of changes ordered by Mr. Ashcroft in his 2002 revamping of the bureau's investigative guidelines. Among other changes, the new guidelines allowed F.B.I. agents to visit public sites and events, attend mosques and other religious institutions, or peruse the Internet in search of leads in terrorism cases.

The changes relaxed restrictions put in place in the 1970's as a result of F.B.I. abuses in the monitoring of political dissidents, and they have drawn criticism from civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders who say they open the door to investigative abuses.

Critics charged last year that the F.B.I. had abused its expanded powers by monitoring, interviewing and sometimes subpoenaing antiwar protesters and political protesters in advance of the political conventions last summer. The inspector general's office disclosed in its report Monday that it was conducting a separate investigation to determine whether the F.B.I. interrogations of protesters were in fact improper.

The inspector general's review found that there was "widespread recognition" among F.B.I. agents and officials of the constitutional and privacy implications of expanding the bureau's ability to monitor public sites. But the review found that there were "gaps" in how the new policy had been put into effect, raising management concerns.

For instance, agents are "encouraged, but not required" to get the approval of a supervisor before attending a public event or site. And it was not always clear what information the F.B.I. could retain if it did not relate to an investigation.

As a result, "an absence of routine documentation" made it difficult if not impossible to assess how agents were using their new powers and whether those powers were being abused, the report said.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., told the inspector general's office that because agents were not required to get supervisors' approval before visiting public sites, it was "difficult to determine to what extent these authorities have been used," the inspector general's office said. It called on the F.B.I. to consider requiring approval from supervisors and more documentation of public visits to guard against possible abuses.

Justice Dept. Report Cites F.B.I. Violations

2008-10-05T15:55:00.000-05:00

NY Times
March 9, 2006
Justice Dept. Report Cites F.B.I. Violations
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, March 8 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said.

While some of these instances were considered technical glitches, the report, from the department's inspector general, characterized others as "significant," including wiretaps that were much broader in scope than approved by a court and others that were allowed to continue for weeks or sometimes months longer than was authorized.

In one instance, the F.B.I. received the full content of 181 telephone calls as part of an intelligence investigation, instead of merely the billing and toll records as authorized, the report found. In a handful of cases, it said, the bureau conducted physical searches that had not been properly authorized.

The inspector general's findings come at a time of fierce Congressional debate over the program of wiretapping without warrants that the National Security Agency has conducted. That program, approved by President Bush, is separate from the F.B.I. wiretaps reviewed in the report, and the inspector general's office concluded that it did not have the jurisdiction to review the legality or operations of the N.S.A. effort.

But, the report disclosed, the Justice Department has opened reviews into two other controversial counterterrorism tactics that the department has widely employed since the Sept. 11 attacks.

In one, the inspector general has begun looking into the F.B.I.'s use of administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, to demand records and documents without warrants in terror investigations. Some critics maintain that the bureau has abused its subpoena powers to demand records in thousands of cases.

In the other, the Office of Professional Responsibility, a Justice Department unit that reviews ethics charges against department lawyers, has opened inquiries related to the detention of 21 people held as material witnesses in terror investigations.

As with the F.B.I.'s use of administrative subpoenas, civil rights advocates assert that the Justice Department has abused the material witness statute by holding suspects whom it may not have enough evidence to charge. The new ethics inquiries are reviewing accusations that department officials did not take some material witnesses to court within the required time, failed to tell them the basis for the arrest or held them without any attempt to obtain their testimony as supposed witnesses in terror investigations, the inspector general said Wednesday.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, characterized the report as "yet another vindication for those of us who have raised concerns about the administration's policies in the war on terror."

Mr. Conyers said that "despite the Bush administration's attempt to demonize critics of its antiterrorism policies as advancing phantom or trivial concerns, the report demonstrates that the independent Office of Inspector General has found that many of these policies indeed warrant full investigations."

For its part, the F.B.I. said in a statement that it had been quick to correct errors in intelligence-gathering procedures when they were discovered and that "there have been no examples by the F.B.I. of willful disregard for the law or of court orders."

The inspector general's review grew out of documents, dealing with intelligence violations, that were released last year under a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a private group in Washington. The inspector general then obtained more documents on violations and included an 11-page analysis of the problem as part of a broader report Wednesday on counterterrorism measures.

The inspector general reviewed 108 instances in which the F.B.I. reported violations to an oversight board in the 2004 and 2005 fiscal years.

"We're always looking to bring the number of violations down," John Miller, chief spokesman for the bureau, said in an interview, "but given the scope and complexity of national security investigations, that's a relatively small number."

The inspector general's review found that reported violations under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs some federal wiretaps, accounted for a growing share of the total, having risen to 69 percent last year from 48 percent in 2004.

The duration of the violations also grew in some crucial areas, the review found. Two of those areas were the "overcollection" of intelligence — going beyond the scope approved by the court in authorizing a wiretap — and "overruns," in which a wiretap or other intelligence-gathering method was allowed to continue beyond the approved time period without an extension.

The review found that the average amount of time that overcollections and overruns were allowed before they were discovered and corrected rose to 32 days last year from 22 in 2004. In most cases, the F.B.I. was found to be at fault, while about a quarter of the time a "third party," usually a telecommunications company, was to blame, the data showed.

In taking issue with some of the findings, F.B.I. officials said the data were skewed by a number of exceptionally long violations; one wiretap lasted 373 days.

DOJ faults FBI for fingerprinting error

2008-10-05T15:51:00.000-05:00

DOJ faults FBI for fingerprinting error

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — An FBI mistake linking an Oregon lawyer, a Muslim convert, to the 2004 Madrid train bombings was a "watershed event" that led to improved fingerprint identification but more needs to be done, according to a federal report.

The 330-page Department of Justice report released Friday, the day before the second anniversary of the bombings, expanded on its January report that faulted the FBI for sloppy work but concluded the government did not misuse the anti-terror Patriot Act against Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield.

FBI experts mistakenly matched fingerprints found on a bag of detonators in Madrid to Mayfield's after the March 11, 2004 train bombings that killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,500.

Mayfield, who was jailed for two weeks in 2004 on a material witness warrant, was released after the FBI acknowledged the fingerprint was not his.

"Among other things, the examiners applied circular reasoning, allowing details visible in Mayfield's known prints to suggest features in the murky or ambiguous details ... that were not really there," the report by the department's internal watchdog said.

Mayfield is suing the federal government.

Some of the report was blacked out — especially details of the FBI's search of Mayfield's home and office, which are the subject of Mayfield's lawsuit.

The Justice Department's Inspector General, Glenn Fine, conducted an investigation into Mayfield's arrest.

The full report states that the misidentification of the fingerprint was a "watershed event for the FBI Laboratory, which has described latent fingerprint identification as the 'gold standard for forensic science.'"

But Fine adds that "we found that some of the changes adopted by the (FBI) Laboratory were not fully responsive to the issues raised by the Mayfield misidentification."

The report outlined at least six recommendations, including alternate procedures for verifications; reviewing previous cases based on a single fingerprint identified through the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System; and requiring documentation of observed features before comparisons are made to confirm the identification.

FBI Special Agent Ann Todd, a spokeswoman for the lab, said the two FBI experts who first examined the print are not doing case work, "although both have been cleared to do so."

An FBI contractor who verified the identification has "not performed any work for the FBI laboratory subsequent to the Mayfield error," Todd said.

She said that in the 73-year history of the latent prints operation, the lab has made an erroneous identification once every 11 years, on average.

F.B.I. Abandons Disputed Test for Bullets From Crime Scenes

2008-10-05T15:44:00.000-05:00

NY Times
September 2, 2005
F.B.I. Abandons Disputed Test for Bullets From Crime Scenes
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Sept. 1 - F.B.I. scientists said Thursday that they would abandon a controversial bullet-matching technique that had been used in thousands of investigations.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it still had confidence in the scientific reliability of the technique, which is known as bullet lead analysis and analyzes the chemical composition of a bullet. But in light of criticism of how the results were interpreted in court, the bureau said it would stop conducting the tests.

The bureau's laboratory in Quantico, Va., is the only one in the country that performs the analysis, an expensive process that seeks to determine how a particular bullet found at a crime scene compares with other bullets in the possession of a suspect.

A major study last year by the National Research Council found that the bureau's examiners had sometimes overstated the test results in concluding that a bullet had come from a certain box or batch of ammunition.

"It was a difficult decision to abandon a technique," said Dwight Adams, the director of the F.B.I. laboratory, in an interview. "This is a valid science, but the issue here goes beyond the science into the courtroom and the way evidence is presented, and there was the potential for the results to be overstated or misunderstood when an examiner would say that two bullets were analytically indistinguishable."

The F.B.I. has conducted about 2,500 bullet-lead tests since the 1980's as part of local, state, federal and foreign investigations. It imposed a moratorium on the technique last year after the research council's study before announcing Thursday that it would drop the practice.

The bureau is notifying some 300 law enforcement agencies that have received positive test results from the technique since 1996 to help them determine whether further review of their cases is needed.

A number of defendants who were convicted with the help of the bullet-testing technique have challenged the evidence because of questions about its reliability, and experts said the F.B.I.'s decision would probably lead to more legal challenges.

"This whole episode is a huge black eye for the F.B.I.," said William Thompson, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, who has studied the issue. "There are many cases where examiners were giving testimony that was wholly unreliable in claiming they could determine the same bullets came from the same box."

Ken MacFadden, a chemist who headed the National Research Council panel that produced last year's report, said juries were often led to believe from F.B.I. testimony that a "match" of two bullets could be likened to a conclusive DNA match, when it might be no more definitive than two people sharing a blood type.

The F.B.I.'s decision to stop using the technique went beyond the panel's own recommendations, Mr. MacFadden said. But, he added, "This decision make sense given the serious questions that are out there."

COINTELPRO: Lecture by Ward Churchill

2008-10-05T15:19:00.000-05:00

Listen to this passionate, scholarly, and far reaching analysis of COINTELPRO by Ward Churchill*.

Beginning with the World War I period, Churchill covers: the Palmer Raids; the defeat of the Anarchists and of Marcus Garvey; the attacks on the Civil Rights Movement; the 1964 murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney; and the murders of Black Panthers. Churchill also gives a detailed description of the FBI raid on the Pine Ridge reservation on June 26, 1975, and of the case against Leonard Peltier.

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Radio program on COINTELPRO with Ward Churchill**

Part 1, 29:00 Minutes (MP3 Format, 13.2 MB) Listen
Part 2, 29:03 Minutes (MP3 Format, 13.2 MB) Listen

-----
*Ward Churchill, formerly a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado (Boulder), is a Vietnam Veteran and survivor of the FBI war against the American Indian Movement. Among his many books are "The COINTELPRO Papers," "Indians Are US," and "A Little Matter of Genocide."
**MP3 audio stream provided by TUC Radio in San Francisco (www.tucradio.org) via Radio4All (www.radio4all.net).

Learn More

2008-10-05T15:01:00.000-05:00

Learn More About COINTELPRO

Activists may download COINTELPRO: The Danger We Face.

Read COINTELPRO: The Sabotage Of Legitimate Dissent (provided by
www.whatreallyhappened.com):

Church Committee Members on Covert Actions Against American Citizens

2008-10-05T14:47:00.000-05:00

Covert Actions Against American Citizens Living in America

In the following videos, members of the Church Committee talk about covert actions against American citizens living in America—then and now.

The full story of COINTELPRO may never be told. The Bureau's files were never seized by Congress or the courts or sent to the National Archives. Some were destroyed. In addition, many counterintelligence operations were never committed to writing as such, or involved open investigations making ex-operatives legally prohibited from talking about them. Most operations remained secret until long after the damage had been done.

Church Committee Reports

2008-10-05T14:28:00.000-05:00

Excerpts from the Church Committee reports*

Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II

Supplementary Detailed Staff Reports, Book III

* Books II and III of the Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United States Senate, 94th Congress, 2nd Session, 1976. Links provided by http://www.cointel.org/, a site developed and maintained by attorney Paul Wolf.

COINTELPRO "Discontinued"

2008-10-05T14:19:00.000-05:00

COINTELPRO "Discontinued"

In truth, the FBI conducted more than 2,000 COINTELPRO operations before the programs were officially discontinued in April of 1971, after public exposure, in order to "afford additional security to [its] sensitive techniques and operations." While the programs themselves were discontinued, the FBI's objectionable practices were not. The FBI's intent was/is to continue such practices as deemed necessary and completely at its own whim. That intent was clearly stated by the FBI. It's a matter of public record.

Church Committee Findings

2008-10-05T14:13:00.000-05:00

In 1975, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (also known as the Church Committee) investigated the counterintelligence activities of the Federal Bureau of Investigation over a 25-year period. With regard to its COINTELPRO operations, the Church Committee found the Bureau responsible for:

violating and ignoring the law;
exceeding its powers with regard to domestic intelligence activity;
using excessively intrusive techniques against United States citizens;
using covert action to disrupt and discredit domestic groups;
abusing intelligence information for political purposes; and
having inadequate controls, as well as no accountability.

COINTELPRO Tactics

2008-10-05T14:09:00.000-05:00

COINTELPRO Tactics

Although the FBI's covert operations have been active throughout its history, the formal COunter INTELligence PROgram, or COINTELPRO, of the second half of the 20th century was centrally directed and targeted a range of political dissidents and organizations. The stated goals of COINTELPRO were to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" those persons or organizations that the FBI decided were "enemies of the State."

At its most extreme dimension, political dissidents have been eliminated outright or sent to prison for the rest of their lives. Many more, however, were "neutralized" by intimidation, harassment, discrediting, and a whole assortment of authoritarian and illegal tactics.
Neutralization, as explained on record by the FBI, didn’t necessarily pertain to the apprehension of parties in the commission of a crime, the preparation of evidence against them, and securing of a judicial conviction. Rather, the FBI simply made activists incapable of engaging in political activity by whatever means.

For those not assessed as being in themselves a security risk but engaged in what the Bureau viewed to be politically objectionable activity, those techniques consisted of disseminating derogatory information to the target's family, friends and associates, or visiting and questioning them. False information was planted in the press. The targets' efforts to speak in public were frustrated, and employers were contacted to try to get them fired. Anonymous letters accusing targets of infidelity were sent by the FBI to their spouses. Other letters contained death threats. These strategies are well-documented, for example, in the case of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. Records also show that activists in the 1960s were repeatedly arrested "on any excuse" until "they could no longer make bail."

In addition, the FBI made use of informants, often quite violent and emotionally disturbed individuals, to present false testimony to the courts and frame COINTELPRO targets for crimes the FBI knew they did not commit. In some cases the charges were quite serious, including murder.

Another option was "snitch jacketing" where the FBI made the target look like a police informant or an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. This served the dual purposes of isolating and alienating important leaders, as well as increasing the general level of fear and factionalism in the group.

Many counterintelligence techniques involved the use of paid informants. Informants became "agent provocateurs" by raising controversial issues at meetings to take advantage of ideological divisions; promoting enmity with other groups; or inciting the group to violent acts, even to the point of providing them with weapons. Over the years, FBI provocateurs repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruptions of meetings and demonstrations, attacks on police, bombings, etc.

FBI Covert Operations

2008-10-05T13:51:00.000-05:00

FBI Covert Operations

On December 21, 2007, the New York Times reported that a document was declassified as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. (See page 18 of 789.) That document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty. This surprised many Americans. It shouldn't have. Despite the public image of the FBI as the nation's premier law enforcement agency, it has always functioned primarily as America's political police. This role includes not only the collection of intelligence on the activities of political dissidents and groups, but often times counterintelligence operations to thwart those activities.

Sedition Act of 1918

2008-10-05T11:39:00.000-05:00

Sedition Act of 1918
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Sedition Act of 1918 was an amendment to the Espionage Act of 1917 passed at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, who was concerned that dissent, in time of war, was a significant threat to morale. The passing of this act forbade Americans to use "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, flag, or armed forces during war. The act also allowed the Postmaster General to deny mail delivery to dissenters of government policy during wartime.

Freedom of speech in the United States is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states in part: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or the press". The United States Supreme Court upheld the Sedition Act at the time it was in effect in Debs v. United States, but subsequent Supreme Court decisions (such as Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969) make it less likely that a similar law would be considered constitutional today.

The Espionage Act made it a crime to help enemies of the United States, but the Sedition Act made it a crime to utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States' form of government.

U.S. citizens, including members of the Industrial Workers of the World union, were also imprisoned during World War I for their anti-war dissent under the provisions of the Sedition Act. Anti-war protesters were arrested by the hundreds as speaking out against the draft and the war became illegal under this law.

In his 1941 book Censorship 1917, James Mock noted that most U.S. newspapers "showed no antipathy toward the act" and "far from opposing the measure, the leading papers seemed actually to lead the movement in behalf of its speedy enactment." And as mentioned in his book, "The Great Influenza" [John M. Barry], he noted that it was because of their willingness to so blindly follow and even lead this movement back then that explains why we today have so little information on specific numbers of deaths in particular locations caused by the 1918 influenza pandemic that swept this nation and the entire world at that time. They wished us not to know for fear that it might lower the morale of the civilians supporting the war effort and the morale of the troops fighting the war, even though hundreds, nay thousands of them were dying of the disease every day at the time. All they would ever say is, "There is no need to worry. There is no epidemic."

Congress repealed the Sedition Act on December 13, 1920.[1] [2] The repeal of the Sedition Act was the apparent result of its many abuses during World War I, including actions by the Wilson administration and the postmaster general.[3]

Contents

1 Text of the Sedition Act
1.1 Section 3
1.2 Section 4
2 See also
3 References
4 External links

Text of the Sedition Act

Section 3

Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States, or to promote the success of its enemies, or shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements, or say or do anything except by way of bona fide and not disloyal advice to an investor or investors, with intent to obstruct the sale by the United States of bonds or other securities of the United States or the making of loans by or to the United States, and whoever when the United States is at war, shall willfully cause or attempt to cause, or incite or attempt to incite, insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct or attempt to obstruct the recruiting or enlistment services of the United States, and whoever, when the United States is at war, shall willfully utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag of the United States, or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute, or shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any language intended to incite, provoke, or encourage resistance to the United States, or to promote the cause of its enemies, or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully by utterance, writing, printing, publication, or language spoken, urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production in this country of any thing or things, product or products, necessary or essential to the prosecution of the war in which the United States may be engaged, with intent by such curtailment to cripple or hinder the United States in the prosecution of war, and whoever shall willfully advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated, and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or the imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both: Provided, That any employee or official of the United States Government who commits any disloyal act or utters any unpatriotic or disloyal language, or who, in an abusive and violent manner criticizes the Army or Navy or the flag of the United States shall be at once dismissed from the service..

Section 4

When the United States is at war, the Postmaster General may, upon evidence satisfactory to him that any person or concern is using the mails in violation of any of the provisions of this Act, instruct the postmaster at any post office at which mail is received addressed to such person or concern to return to the postmaster at the office at which they were originally mailed all letters or other matter so addressed, with the words "Mail to this address undeliverable under Espionage Act" plainly written or stamped upon the outside thereof, and all such letters or other matter so returned to such postmasters shall be by them returned to the senders thereof under such regulations as the Postmaster General may prescribe.

See also:

Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798
Australian sedition law
Palmer Raids
Debs v. United States

References

-- Stone, Geoffrey R. (2004). Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p230. ISBN 0393058808.
-- Geoffrey R. Stone and Stephen J. Chulhofer "BRIEF OF AMICUS CURIAE FRED KOREMATSU IN SUPPORT OF PETITIONERS" to the Supreme Court of the United States, No. 03-334, 03-343, 03-6696
-- Stone, 2004 ibid

External links

Example of a prosecution brought soon after the Sedition Act became law